The existence of such textual additions in the Bible is universally admitted by Biblical scholars with regard to the Hebrew text, although there is at times considerable disagreement as to the actual expressions that should be treated as such.
Besides the eighteen corrections of the Scribes which ancient Rabbis regard as made in the Tanakh before their time, and which were probably due to the fact that marginal explanations had of old been embodied in the text itself, recent scholars have treated as textual additions many words and expressions scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible.
Others, struck with the lack of smoothness of style noticeable in several passages of the original Hebrew, or with the apparent inconsistencies in its parallel statements, have appealed to textual additions as offering a natural and adequate explanation of the facts observed.
Some have even admitted the view that Midrashim, or kinds of Jewish commentaries, were at an early date utilized in the framing or in the transcription of our present Hebrew text, and thus would account for what they consider as actual and extensive additions to its primitive form.
The presence of similar textual additions in the text of the Septuagint, or oldest Greek translation of the Old Testament, was well known to the Roman editors of that version under Sixtus V. One has only to compare attentively the words of that ancient version with those of the original Hebrew to remain convinced that the Septuagint translators have time and again deliberately deviated from the text which they rendered into Greek, and thus made a number of more or less important additions thereunto.
Its author, Jerome, freely inserted in his rendering of the original Hebrew historical, geographical and doctrinal remarks he thought necessary for the understanding of Scriptural passages by ordinary readers.
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.
The following are the principal glossaries of that description: 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".
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 Church 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 the Bible.