1. Then his son Judas, called Maccabeus, rose up in his stead.

2. And all his brethren helped him, and so did all they that held with his father, and they fought with cheerfulness the battle of Israel.

3. So he gat his people great honour, and put on a breastplate as a giant, and girt his warlike harness about him, and he made battles, protecting the host with his sword.

4. In his acts he was like a lion, and like a lion’s whelp roaring for his prey.

5. For He pursued the wicked, and sought them out, and burnt up those that vexed his people.

6. Wherefore the wicked shrunk for fear of him, and all the workers of iniquity were troubled, because salvation prospered in his hand.

7. He grieved also many kings, and made Jacob glad with his acts, and his memorial is blessed for ever.

8. Moreover he went through the cities of Juda, destroying the ungodly out of them, and turning away wrath from Israel:

9. So that he was renowned unto the utmost part of the earth, and he received unto him such as were ready to perish.

10. Then Apollonius gathered the Gentiles together, and a great host out of Samaria, to fight against Israel.

11. Which thing when Judas perceived, he went forth to meet him, and so he smote him, and slew him: many also fell down slain, but the rest fled.

12. Wherefore Judas took their spoils, and Apollonius’ sword also, and therewith he fought all his life long.

13. Now when Seron, a prince of the army of Syria, heard say that Judas had gathered unto him a multitude and company of the faithful to go out with him to war;

14. He said, I will get me a name and honour in the kingdom; for I will go fight with Judas and them that are with him, who despise the king’s commandment.

15. So he made him ready to go up, and there went with him a mighty host of the ungodly to help him, and to be avenged of the children of Israel.

16. And when he came near to the going up of Bethhoron, Judas went forth to meet him with a small company:

17. Who, when they saw the host coming to meet them, said unto Judas, How shall we be able, being so few, to fight against so great a multitude and so strong, seeing we are ready to faint with fasting all this day?

18. Unto whom Judas answered, It is no hard matter for many to be shut up in the hands of a few; and with the God of heaven it is all one, to deliver with a great multitude, or a small company:

19. For the victory of battle standeth not in the multitude of an host; but strength cometh from heaven.

20. They come against us in much pride and iniquity to destroy us, and our wives and children, and to spoil us:

21. But we fight for our lives and our laws.

22. Wherefore the Lord himself will overthrow them before our face: and as for you, be ye not afraid of them.

23. Now as soon as he had left off speaking, he leapt suddenly upon them, and so Seron and his host was overthrown before him.

24. And they pursued them from the going down of Bethhoron unto the plain, where were slain about eight hundred men of them; and the residue fled into the land of the Philistines.

25. Then began the fear of Judas and his brethren, and an exceeding great dread, to fall upon the nations round about them:

35 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.

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