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Thomas Oden Lambdin was born October 31, 1927, in Frederick, Maryland. He was one of four brothers, whom he often, conveniently, referred to as “my older brother,” “my twin brother,” and “my younger brother.” And, of course, it was not lost on him that his name came from the common Semitic noun taw’am, meaning “twin.”
After serving in the U.S. Army and being stationed in Guam, Lambdin received his B.A. degree from Franklin and Marshall College in 1948. For his doctorate, he studied under William F. Albright and Frank R. Blake at Johns Hopkins University. He received the Ph.D. in 1952—with a dissertation on Egyptian Loanwords and Transcriptions in the Ancient Semitic Languages, the aim of which was to establish a firm foundation for the pronunciation of ancient Egyptian. Lambdin’s expertise ranged from ancient Egyptian history to aspects of comparative Semitic grammar. He also contributed an important translation of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (edited by J.M. Robinson, 1977).
After completing his doctorate, Lambdin stayed at Hopkins for eight years, as the successor of his teacher Blake. In 1960, he moved to Harvard University, where he was named Professor of Semitic Philology. He took early retirement from Harvard in 1983, at the age of 55, telling the Harvard student newspaper, “I have been overachieving since first grade, and I want to work at my own pace.” And, indeed, Lambdin’s teaching schedule was always formidable. In 1975–1976, for example, he taught year-long courses in Biblical Hebrew, Classical Ethiopic, Coptic, and Comparative Semitic Grammar; a semester of Egyptian history; and—informally but with full preparation—year-long advanced reading courses in Middle Egyptian and Ethiopic.
His devotion to teaching was legendary, and from his long hours of course preparation came the superb textbooks for which he is best known: Introduction to Biblical Hebrew (1971; translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish), Introduction to Classical Ethiopic (Ge‘ez) (1978), Introduction to Sahidic Coptic (1983), and Introduction to the Aramaic of Targum Onqelos (revised by me, 2020).
Upon his retirement, Lambdin was presented with a festschrift in his honor containing articles that reflected the diversity of his scholarly interests, while the title of the festschrift, Working with No Data (edited by David M. Golomb, 1987), reflected his innate skepticism of linguistic certainties. In retirement, Lambdin returned to a lifelong interest in Indo-European languages, which led him to produce another textbook: An 022Introduction to the Gothic Language (2006). He also continued his study of many other languages, such as Chinese and Finnish. His mastery of the details of languages was simply astonishing.
Professor Lambdin died at his home in Manchester, New Hampshire, on May 8, 2020, at the age of 92. He was predeceased by his younger brother, Robert, and is survived by his older brother, William, and twin brother, Philip.
Thomas Oden Lambdin was born October 31, 1927, in Frederick, Maryland. He was one of four brothers, whom he often, conveniently, referred to as “my older brother,” “my twin brother,” and “my younger brother.” And, of course, it was not lost on him that his name came from the common Semitic noun taw’am, meaning “twin.”
