David Gordon Lyon was born in Benton, Alabama on May 24, 1852, the son of a doctor.

He studied at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary under Crawford Howell Toy, and went to Germany, and received his PhD from the University of Leipzig in 1882, in the study of Syriac.

[4] He occupied the Hollis Chair at Harvard Divinity School[5] from 1882[6] to 1910, when he assumed the Hancock professorship of Hebrew and other Oriental languages.

[7] Six years after Tosca Woehler's death (1904) he married Mabel E. Harris (d.

In 2014, the Semitic Museum began a project entitled "Harvard and the Ancient Near East: The David Gordon Lyon Diaries", to digitize and transcribe the volumes into a human and machine-readable form.