Glosses To The Bible - Glosses As Scriptural Lexicons

Glosses As Scriptural Lexicons

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.