1. Now in the hundred threescore and twelfth year king Demetrius gathered his forces together, and went into Media to get him help to fight against Tryphone.

2. But when Arsaces, the king of Persia and Media, heard that Demetrius was entered within his borders, he sent one of his princes to take him alive:

3. Who went and smote the host of Demetrius, and took him, and brought him to Arsaces, by whom he was put in ward.

4. As for the land of Judea, that was quiet all the days of Simon; for he sought the good of his nation in such wise, as that evermore his authority and honour pleased them well.

5. And as he was honourable in all his acts, so in this, that he took Joppa for an haven, and made an entrance to the isles of the sea,

6. And enlarged the bounds of his nation, and recovered the country,

7. And gathered together a great number of captives, and had the dominion of Gazera, and Bethsura, and the tower, out of the which he took all uncleaness, neither was there any that resisted him.

8. Then did they till their ground in peace, and the earth gave her increase, and the trees of the field their fruit.

9. The ancient men sat all in the streets, communing together of good things, and the young men put on glorious and warlike apparel.

10. He provided victuals for the cities, and set in them all manner of munition, so that his honourable name was renowned unto the end of the world.

11. He made peace in the land, and Israel rejoiced with great joy:

12. For every man sat under his vine and his fig tree, and there was none to fray them:

13. Neither was there any left in the land to fight against them: yea, the kings themselves were overthrown in those days.

14. Moreover he strengthened all those of his people that were brought low: the law he searched out; and every contemner of the law and wicked person he took away.

15. He beautified the sanctuary, and multiplied vessels of the temple.

16. Now when it was heard at Rome, and as far as Sparta, that Jonathan was dead, they were very sorry.

17. But as soon as they heard that his brother Simon was made high priest in his stead, and ruled the country, and the cities therein:

18. They wrote unto him in tables of brass, to renew the friendship and league which they had made with Judas and Jonathan his brethren:

19. Which writings were read before the congregation at Jerusalem.

20. And this is the copy of the letters that the Lacedemonians sent; The rulers of the Lacedemonians, with the city, unto Simon the high priest, and the elders, and priests, and residue of the people of the Jews, our brethren, send greeting:

21. The ambassadors that were sent unto our people certified us of your glory and honour: wherefore we were glad of their coming,

22. And did register the things that they spake in the council of the people in this manner; Numenius son of Antiochus, and Antipater son of Jason, the Jews’ ambassadors, came unto us to renew the friendship they had with us.

23. And it pleased the people to entertain the men honourably, and to put the copy of their ambassage in publick records, to the end the people of the Lacedemonians might have a memorial thereof: furthermore we have written a copy thereof unto Simon the high priest.

24. After this Simon sent Numenius to Rome with a great shield of gold of a thousand pound weight to confirm the league with them.

25. Whereof when the people heard, they said, What thanks shall we give to Simon and his sons?

24 more verses…

About this reader

What is Scripture?

Scripture is a browser-based reader for sixteen sacred texts spanning multiple religious and literary traditions. It provides chapter-by-chapter navigation, full-text search across all works, word concordance with frequency analysis, verse-linked notes, text-to-speech, and deep linking to any chapter or verse.

Traditions Represented

The collection spans Abrahamic, East Asian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Finnish, and Norse traditions. It includes King James biblical text and Apocrypha, Pickthall's Quran, the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price, Legge's Four Books, Tao Te Ching, and Book of Poetry, Chamberlain's Kojiki, West's Bundahishn, Kern's Lotus Sutra, Haug and West's Arda Viraf, Crawford's Kalevala, and Bellows' Poetic Edda.

The committed manifests and chapter files currently describe 121 books, 2,724 chapters, and 63,141 verse records. In poetry and prose works, a verse record can represent a line or paragraph rather than a canonically numbered scriptural verse.

Licensing

The application source is AGPL-3.0. Generated text downloads and their structured arrangement are CC BY-SA 4.0; the underlying historic source texts are treated as public-domain inputs. The corpus metadata therefore describes the distributed arrangement with its CC BY-SA license rather than the Public Domain Mark.

Concordance and Related Passages

The concordance is an exact-word occurrence index with linked records grouped by work. Related Passages is separate: a TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) cosine-similarity index compares chapter vocabulary after stop-word removal and stores up to five cross-book matches above its threshold. It is a lexical discovery aid, not a claim of historical or theological equivalence.

Deep Linking

Every chapter and verse has a permanent URL. Chapter links follow the pattern /scripture/{work}/{book}-{chapter} (e.g., /scripture/ot/gen-1 for Genesis 1). Verse links append the verse number (e.g., /scripture/ot/gen-1:26 for Genesis 1:26). These URLs can be shared, bookmarked, or cited directly.

Accessibility

Scripture supports keyboard navigation throughout: Tab moves between controls, Enter activates verse actions, and arrow keys navigate chapters. The reading pane has a skip-to-content link. All overlays (search, concordance) are focus-trapped ARIA dialogs. Dynamic content regions use aria-live for screen reader announcements. Light and dark themes are available through the theme toggle. Verse numbers are visible to assistive technology. No flashing content or motion hazards.

Scripture is part of a suite of educational simulations at a9l.im. Explore particle physics with Geon, redistricting with Gerry, or cellular metabolism with Cyano.