First Freely Licensed LXX Morphology

A word-level morphological dataset for the Rahlfs Septuagint (1935) is now available under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, covering 59 books of the Greek Old Testament: Pentateuch, historical books, prophets, wisdom, the deuterocanon, and the Psalms of Solomon.

It is, to our knowledge, the first time a complete morphological analysis of the Septuagint has been published under a permissive licence. Existing scholarly editions ship under terms that either prevent redistribution outright or attach restrictions incompatible with downstream reuse. This one does not.

What's in it

Every Greek word in every verse of the Rahlfs LXX carries:

• surface: the inflected form as it appears in the text
• lemma: the LSJ headword
• parsing: tense, voice, mood, person, number, case, gender as applicable
• pos: part of speech
• provenance: how the parse was derived, with a confidence band attached

The corpus follows a small set of explicit conventions that shape how the data should be read: suppletive lemmas (εἶπεν → λέγω, εἶδον → ὁράω), substantival adjectives tagged as nouns, anaphoric αὐτός carrying no gender, Hebrew indeclinables with empty parsing, compound verbs keeping their compound lemma, and so on. These are spelled out in the repository README.

Licensing

• Data: CC BY 4.0. Attribute and you can use it for anything, including commercial work.
• Pipeline code: ISC; minimal and permissive.
• Source text: Rahlfs Septuagint (1935) is in the public domain.

Where to find it

The repository lives at git.sr.ht/~sethkush/lxx-morph. The Greek text itself, with the morphology already loaded, is browseable in the Open Scriptorium reader — start with Genesis 1 and hover or click any word for its lemma, parsing, and gloss.

A note on provenance

This corpus is the work of a self-taught student of Koine, not a trained classicist. The lemmatisation, parsing, and POS tags are the product of a tooling pipeline plus iterative editorial review at that level of expertise. There are almost certainly errors a specialist would catch, and decisions a specialist would have made differently. If you use this data in scholarly work, please treat it accordingly. Verify against an authoritative edition before citing.

The licence (CC BY 4.0) deliberately permits correction and republication. If you have the expertise to improve any of it, please send your corrections.

Feedback, corrections, and suggestions are welcome. Open an issue on the sr.ht tracker or get in touch.