Sefaria: The Free Hebrew Library, with Brown-Driver-Briggs
The ficha on Perseus in this section ends with a warning: there is no Hebrew there, and none is planned. Sefaria is the answer to that sentence. It is what Perseus is for Greek, built for the Hebrew library instead.
Sefaria is a nonprofit founded in 2011 by Joshua Foer and Brett Lockspeiser, building what it calls a free living library of Jewish texts and their interconnections, in Hebrew and in translation. As of 2024 the library held roughly 183 million words. The code is open source and the texts are public domain or under free public licences.
Why an exegete of the Old Testament needs this
The obvious value is the Tanakh in Hebrew with English alongside, free and instantly searchable. The deeper value is everything around it: Talmud in both the Babylonian and Jerusalem recensions, Midrash, and the classical commentators — Rashi, Ramban, Ibn Ezra — linked verse by verse to the text they comment on.
That linking is the feature no printed library reproduces. Open a verse in Genesis and the interpretive tradition attached to it appears beside it. For anyone writing on the history of interpretation, this collapses weeks of library work into an afternoon.
The lexicon, and the parallel with Perseus
Sefaria includes the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew lexicon. The parallel with Perseus is exact and worth stating plainly: BDB is to Hebrew what Liddell-Scott-Jones is to Greek, the standard older reference now in the public domain and therefore free, while the current standard, HALOT, is expensive and available legally nowhere at no cost.
BDB is dated in places, particularly in its comparative Semitic etymologies, and a serious dissertation will cite HALOT. Despite that limitation, for checking whether a proposed meaning has any lexical basis at all, BDB answers the question, and answers it for free.
How to use it without going astray
- Read the Hebrew before the translation. The bilingual display is a gift and a trap; the eye slides right if you let it.
- Follow one verse through its commentators. Choose a difficult verse and read Rashi, then Ibn Ezra, then Ramban. You will learn more about Hebrew syntax from watching them disagree than from any chart.
- Treat rabbinic material as evidence, not as authority. These are readings from within a tradition with its own commitments, which is exactly what makes them valuable as historical evidence of how the text was heard.
- Verify against a critical edition. Sefaria gives you the text, not the apparatus. For text-critical work the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia remains necessary.
- Cite the source, not the platform. Reference BDB or the commentator by name and edition. Sefaria is the delivery mechanism.
A word on reading across the fence
Some Christian students hesitate before a Jewish library. The hesitation is misplaced. The Old Testament was read, copied, vocalised and argued over in that tradition for centuries before any of our commentaries existed, and the Masoretes to whom we owe the pointed text belong to it. Reading them is not borrowing from outside; it is reading the people who kept the text we use.
Open the library
Sefaria — Tanakh and commentariesBrown-Driver-Briggs lexicon
In this section
- Daily Dose of Greek and Hebrew: Two Minutes a Day, Free
- Alpha with Angela: A Free Koine Greek Video Course, Openly Licensed
- Bill Mounce: Free Greek Tools from the Author of Basics of Biblical Greek
- Perseus Digital Library: The Free Greek Lexicon Every Exegete Should Know
- Animated Hebrew: Thirty-Five Hours of Free Biblical Hebrew Lectures
