1. Before my mind's eye stands my lord's short car, In which he dares the risks of savage war:— Its pole, whose end turns upward, curving round, And in five places shines, with leather bound; The slip rings and the side straps; the masked place, Where gilt rings to the front unite the trace; The mat of tiger's skin; the naves so long; The steeds, with left legs white, and piebalds, strong. Such my lord's car! He rises in my mind, Lovely and bland, like jade of richest kind; Yet there he lives, in his log hut apart:— The very thought confuses all my heart.

2. The driver with the six reins guides along The horses, with their shining coats, and strong:—. One inside dappled, one bay with black mane; Black-mouthed and bay, and black, the outer twain. Shields, dragon-figured, rise up side by side, Shelter in front 'gainst missiles to provide. Gilt buckles with the carriage front connect The inner reins by which the insides are checkt. I see my lord, thus in his carriage borne, With his mild form the frontier towns adorn. What time can be for his return assigned? Ah me! his figure ever fills my mind!

3. With measured steps move the mail-covered team. The trident spears, with gilded shaft ends gleam. The feather-figured shield, of beauty rare, He holds before him, all his foes to dare. The bow case, made of tiger's skin, and bright With metal plates, lies ready for the fight. It holds two bows which bamboo frames secure, And keep unhurt, to send the arrows sure. To him thus busy all my thoughts are borne, Both when I rest at night and rise at morn. He, my good lord, is tranquil and serene, His virtuous fame more prized, the more he's seen.

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.