Biblical gloss

The English word gloss is derived from the Latin glossa, a transcript of the Greek glossa. In classical Greek it means a tongue or language. In the course of time it was used to designate first a word of the text which needed some explanation, and later the explanation or addition itself.

The words which were commonly the subject of explanatory glosses may be reduced to the following five classes:

• foreign words
• provincial dialectical terms
• obsolete words
• technical terms
• words employed in some unusual sense or in some peculiar grammatical form

Where these glosses consisted of a single explanatory word, they were easily written between the lines of the text or in the margin of manuscripts opposite the words of which they supplied the explanation. In the process of time the glosses grew in number, and in consequence they were gathered in separate books where they appeared, first in the same order of succession as they would have had if written in the margin of the codices, and ultimately in a regular alphabetical order. These collections of glosses thus formed kinds of lexicons which gave the concrete meaning of the difficult words of the text and even historical, geographical, biographical, and other notices, which the collectors deemed necessary or useful to illustrate the text of sacred writings.

A lexicon of the kind is usually called a "glossary" (from Latin glossarium), or just "gloss". From a single explanatory word, interlined or placed in the margin, the word gloss has been extended to denote an entire expository sentence, and in many instances even a running commentary on an entire book.

Marginal notes are found in nearly all manuscripts and printed editions of the scriptures. With regard to the Hebrew text, these glosses or marginal notes are mostly extracts from the Masorah or collection of traditional remarks. They usually bear on what was regarded as a questionable reading or spelling in the text, but yet was allowed to remain unmodified in the text itself through respect for its actual form. At times the margin bids the reader to transpose, interchange, restore, or remove a consonant, while at other times it directs him to omit or insert even an entire word. Some of these glosses are of importance for the correct reading or understanding of the original Hebrew, while nearly all have contributed to its uniform transmission since the 11th century.

The marginal notes of Greek and Latin manuscripts are annotations of all kinds, chiefly the results of exegetical and critical study, crowding the margins of these copies and printed texts far more than those of the manuscripts and editions of the original Hebrew. In regard to the Latin Vulgate, in particular, these glosses grew to so many textual readings that Pope Sixtus V, when publishing his official edition of the Vulgate in 1588, decreed that henceforth copies of it should not be supplied with such variations recorded in the margin. The Douay Version respected this idea.

James I of England wanted the Authorized Version to be free of marginal notes, but it appeared in 1611 with such notes, usually recording various readings. The glosses or marginal notes of the British Revised Version published 1881-1885, are greatly in excess over those of the Version of 1611. They give various readings, alternate renderings, critical remarks, etc. The marginal notes of the American Standard Revised Version (1900–1901) are of the same general description as those found in the British Revised Version.

Rabbinical Tanakh commentaries contain collections of glosses, or "glossaries", with chief object to supply explanations of Hebrew words. A part of the Masorah may also be considered as a kind of glossary to the Hebrew Bible; and the same thing may be said in reference to the collections of Oriental and Western readings given in the sixth volume of the London Polyglot. As regards the Greek Bible texts, there are no separate collections of glosses; yet these texts are taken into account, together with the rest of the Greek literature, in a certain number of glossaries which afford explanations of difficult words in the Greek language. The following are the principal glossaries of that description:

• the lexicon of Hesychius, of the 4th century;
• the "Lexeon synagoge" (collection of glosses) of Photius (died 891);
• the lexicon of Suidas, apparently an author of the 10th century;
• the "Etymologicum Magnum" by an unknown writer of the twelfth or the 13th century;
• the "Synagoge lexeon" of the Byzantine monk Zonaras;
• the "Dictionarium" of the Benedictine Varius Phavorinus, published early in the 16th century.

Most of the glosses illustrating the language of Scripture which are found in the works of Hesychius, Suidas, Phavorinus, and in the "Etymologium Magnum", were collected and published by J. C. Ernesti (Leipzig, 1785–86). The best separate gloss on the Latin Vulgate, as a collection of explanations chiefly of its words, is that of Isidore of Seville, which he completed in 632, and which bears the title of "Originum sive Etymologiarum libri XX". It is found in Migne, P. L., LXXXII.

As Scriptural commentaries there are two celebrated glosses on the Vulgate. The former is the Glossa Ordinaria, thus called from its common use during the Middle Ages. Its author, who was believed to be the German Walafrid Strabo (died 849), had some knowledge of Greek and made extracts chiefly from the Latin Fathers and from the writings of his master, Rabanus Maurus, for the purpose of illustrating the various senses—principally the literal sense—of all the books of Holy Writ. This gloss is quoted as a high authority by Petrus Lombardus and Thomas Aquinas, and it was known as "the tongue of Scripture". Until the 17th century it remained the favourite commentary on the Bible; and it was only gradually superseded by more independent works of exegesis. The "Glossa Ordinaria" is found in vols. CXIII and CXIV of Migne, P. L.

The second gloss, the Glossa Interlinearis, derived its name from the fact that it was written over the words in the text of the Vulgate. It was the work of Anselm of Laon (died 1117), who had some acquaintance with Hebrew and Greek.

After the 12th century copies of the Vulgate were usually supplied with both these glosses, the "Glossa Ordinaria" being inserted in the margin, at the top and at the sides, and the "Glossa Interlinearis" being placed between the lines of the Vulgate text; while later, from the 14th century onward, the "Postilla" of Nicholas of Lyra and the "Additions" of Paulus Burgensis were added at the foot of each page. Some early printed editions of the Vulgate exhibit all this exegetical apparatus; and the latest and best among them is the one by Leander a S. Martino, O.S.B. (six vols. fol., Antwerp, 1634).

• Johann Albert Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca (Hamburg, 1705–28)
• J. A. Ernesti, De vero usu et indole glossariorum graecorum (Leipzig. 1742)
• Hesychii Alexandrini glossae sacrae (Leipzig, 1786)
• Johannes Alberti, Glossarium sacrum in sacros Novi Fœderis libros (Leyden. 1735)
• Paulin Martin, De l'origine du Pentateuque (Paris, 1887), I
• Karl Josef Rudolph Cornely, Introductio in utriusque Test. libros sacros (Paris, 1885), I
• Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, Essays chiefly on the Original Texts of the Old and New Testaments (London, 1891)
• Henry Barclay Swete, Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek (Cambridge, 1900)
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

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Biblical glosses

• Website providing resources about the Glossa Ordinaria and other glosses to the Bible: Glossae.net