ORLINSKY, HARRY MEYER

ORLINSKY, HARRY MEYER (1908–1992), U.S. biblical scholar and philologist. Orlinsky was born in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada and went to the U.S. in 1931, later becoming a fellow at Dropsie College (1931–35) and Johns Hopkins University (1936–41). He was professor of Bible at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City from 1943, chairman of the Society for Biblical Literature (president 1969–70), and chairman of the American Friends of the Israel Exploration Society from 1954.

Orlinsky was co-translator of a five-volume English translation of Rashi's commentary on the Pentateuch, 1949–50; the only Jewish consultant of the Protestant Revised Standard Version (Old Testament, 1952); and editor of the Library of Biblical Studies published by Ktav Publishing House. He was editor in chief of the Jewish Publication Society's new translation of the Pentateuch (1962), to which he wrote a companion volume, Notes on the New Translation of the Torah (1969). His other works include Ancient Israel (1954; 1969⁹) and The So-called "Servant of the Lord" and "Suffering Servant" in Second Isaiah 53 (1964), in which he argues that a servant of yhwh, originally innocent of sin and who dies for the punishment of others, is unknown in Jewish thought until the first century. His textual studies of the scrolls from the Judean Desert argue that the St. Mark's Isaiah Scroll (1qisaa) was copied from memory and is not to be given independent value.

[Zev Garber]