MARINI, MARCO. - Regular canon of the Congregation of the Most Holy Saviour, noted Hebraist, b. in Brescia c. 1542-43, d. there in 1594. He was abbot of S. Agnese on the Via Nomentana (Rome). He refused various bishoprics. He was secretary for Arabic and Persian letters at the court of Venice (1568); in Rome, by order of Gregory XIII, inquisitor of the Jews and charged with purging the Talmud, printed in Basel by Froben in 1588 (without the treatise 'Abhādhāh Zerah').
Proficient in Greek, Arabic, Aramaic, Slavonic and especially in Hebrew (called the “Priscian” of the Hebrew language), in which he wrote the preface to the Enarrationes in Iobum by Stiborius; he supervised the edition of the Targumim of Jonathan (rediscovered by him), Onkelos and Jerusalemite, and left three substantial works still of great relevance today: Hortus Eden, seu Grammatica linguae sanctae (in-4°, Babylon, 1580, reprinted in Venice 1855 and 1593); Arca Noë seu thesaurus linguae sanctae novus (2 vols. in-fol., Venice 1593), an exceedingly rich and learned handbook-dictionary-concordance illustrating passages and terms of the Hebrew text, especially against the Jews; Annotationes literales in Psalmos, completed in Rome and revised in Brescia up to Psalm 28 by the author and published and revised by G. L. Mingarelli (2 vols., Bologna 1748-50). The work is conducted on the Hebrew text with the utmost competence.