1. Yes, all about that southern hill, Great Yu pursued his wondrous toil. He drained the plain, the marsh he dried; Our lord in fields laid out the soil. Their boundaries we now define, As south, or east, the fields incline.

2. The wintry heavens, one arch of clouds, Send down the flakes that fill the sky. Then come the drizzling rains of spring, That moisture, with the snow, supply, To soak and fit the ground for use, And in its season grain produce.

3. The plots, arranged in order fit, The millets in abundance bear. So shall our lord the harvest view; While food and spirits we prepare, For those in whom our sires descend, And guests who at the feast attend.

4. The central plot the huts contains, While gourds each path and boundary line. Their fruits preserved, aside we put, Till 'mong the offerings they shall shine. So through his sires our lord shall gain Long life, and gifts from Heaven obtain.

5. The fragrant spirits first are poured; Then near the gate the bull is led;— So we invite our sires to come. To show the victim pure and red, The knife with bells slides through the hair. Its blood and fat away we bear.

6. 'Then all our offerings we present, Diffusing round a fragrance great. How brilliant is the sacrifice! Our ancestors in kingly state Are there, unseen; but they shall send Blessing and life,—years without end!

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.