Harry M. Orlinsky, 1908–1992

Four days after his 84th birthday, Bible scholar Harry M. Orlinsky died on March 21, 1992 after a long illness. In the forefront of Biblical studies for four decades, Orlinsky in 1954 played a critical part in returning four Dead Sea Scrolls to Israel (see accompanying article). Acting at the request of Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin, Orlinsky secretly and anonymously authenticated the four intact scrolls that Yadin was seeking to purchase for the State of Israel via intermediaries. Today these scrolls—the complete Book of Isaiah, the Book of Habakkuk, the Dead Sea Sect’s Manual of Discipline and the so-called Apocalypse of Lamech—reside in Jerusalem at the Shrine of the Book.

Orlinsky served as president of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1970. He was the only Jewish member of the committees that prepared the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (1952) and the New Revised Standard Version (1990), which is the official translation in many Protestant churches. In that capacity, he championed the plain sense of the text, and consistently illuminated it by recourse to Jewish interpretative tradition. He advocated the same principles in his role as editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society’s translation of the Torah, on which he worked with H. L. Ginsberg of the Jewish Theological Seminary and E. A. Speiser of the University of Pennsylvania, and in his role as co-editor of the Society’s Nevi’im (Prophets) translation.