(Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Languages)

Berenson took advanced Hebrew under David Gordon Lyon shortly after he had been named the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. The first professor of Assyriology in the United States, Lyon was an erudite scholar of numerous Semitic cultures and languages, and taught specialist courses in Assyrian, Aramaic, and Syriac in addition to Hebrew. Lyon was also an archaeologist, and undertook excavations in Samaria. In 1889 he founded the Semitic Museum at Harvard. Professor Lyon composed a letter for Berenson’s Parker Fellowship application (cat. BB.II.4).

See the discussion of Lyon in the online exhibit about the early history of the Harvard Divinity School, hosted by the Andover-Harvard Theological Library.

See the 5 December 1935 obituary in the Harvard Crimson.