1. The sun and moon met in the upper sphere, The day Hsin-mao, the tenth month of the year. The moon was new, as she should reappear, And then the sun, eclipsed, showed evils near. The moon eclipsed before, and now the sun! Alas! we men below shall be undone.

2. These bodies, erring, what is bad make known;— Good men neglected; order all o'erthrown. The moon eclipsed was what full oft takes place; The sun's eclipse portends a sadder case.

3. And flashing levin shows the want of rest. With troubled streams, and tumbling mountain's crest. Large heights subside to vales; deep vales grow hills. Alas! how does the king not stop these ills?

4. Among the ministers great Huang presides; In all their duties Fan the people guides; Chia-pai administers; Chung-yun is cook; The king's decrees Tsou enters in his book; Chueh regulates the stud; the guards Yu's sphere; The wife, in beauty blazing, has no fear.

5. Great Huang, determined his own course pursues, Demands our service, nor inquires our views; Unroofs our homes; our fields makes moor or marsh; And "'Tis the law," he says, "I am not harsh."

6. Farseeing Huang has built himself a town. Three ministers are there of wealth o'ergrown. No single chief he left to guard our king, While all its streets with hoof and chariot ring.

7. I dare not my own services report; But slanderous tongues my blameless life distort. Our ills come not from Heaven, but fawning words And hidden hate, which schemers wield like swords.

8. Far off my village, great my lack of peace, And elsewhere I might go to seek for ease. Others retire, but I shall not be driven From this my post, though dark the way of Heaven.

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.