1. They flit about, the yellow birds, And rest upon the jujubes find. Who buried were in Duke Mu's grave, Alive to awful death consigned? 'Mong brothers three, who met that fate, 'Twas sad the first, Yen-hsi, to see. He stood alone; a hundred men Could show no other such as he. When to the yawning grave he came, Terror unnerved and shook his frame. Why thus destroy our noblest men, To thee we cry, O azure Heaven! To save Yen-hsi from death, we would A hundred lives have freely given.

2. They flit about, the yellow birds, And on the mulberry trees rest find. Who buried were in Duke Mu's grave, Alive to awful death consigned? 'Mong brothers three, who met that fate, 'Twas sad the next, Chung-hang, to see. When on him pressed a hundred men, A match for all of them was he. When to the yawning grave he came, Terror unnerved and shook his frame. Why thus destroy our noblest men, To thee we cry, O azure Heaven! To save Chung-hang from death, we would A hundred lives have freely given.

3. They flit about, the yellow birds, And rest upon the thorn trees find. Who buried were in Duke Mu's grave, Alive to awful death consigned? 'Mong brothers three, who met that fate, 'Twas sad the third, Chen-hu, to see. A hundred men in desperate fight Successfully withstand could he. When to the yawning grave he came, Terror unnerved and shook his frame. Why thus destroy our noblest men, To thee we cry, O azure Heaven! To save Chen-hu from death, we would A hundred lives have freely given.

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.