1. They pull the beans all o'er the ground, To place in baskets square, and round. So reap they what the fields produce, For present and for future use. When now themselves the princes show No stores have I gifts to bestow, Befitting their great worth. Yet a state carriage and its team Will well a feudal prince beseem;— Let such be all brought forth. And from the chambers let them bring The robes that princes wear. From duke to baron, I, the king, On them will these confer.

2. The water bubbles from the spring, And round it grows the cress. So when the princes see the king, Their coming they express In various ways. Now here I see Their flags, with dragon blazonry, All waving in the wind. The gentle tinkling of their bells Comes to my ear, and surely tells They in their chariots, grandly drawn By the four steeds of mighty brawn, Cannot be far behind.

3. The king soon gets a nearer view. The covers red he sees Upon their knees, of brilliant hue, And buskins 'neath the knees. A grave demeanor all display; The Son of Heaven approves. What to such princes can he say, Whose presence rapture moves? In admiration and delight, No grace can he withhold. To some he grants new honors bright, To some confirms the old.

4. The oaks their branches wide extend, With leaves thick covered o'er, Which thus the roots and trunk defend, And make them thrive the more. So do these princes service do, Throughout the land, while they pursue The charges to them given. The various regions well they guard, Nor think they any labor hard, To aid the Son of Heaven. All blessings on their heads collect. And now to court they've brought Their ministers who nought neglect, Strong both in act and thought.

5. The boat is by the rope held fast, Lest it should float away; So round the princes there is cast The king's protective stay. He looks on them with joy intense; He scans their merits to dispense His favors and rewards. He makes their happiness his charge; Their territories to enlarge, As duty he regards. To them it is a pleasure rare, A happy, joyous time, When from their states they here repair, To see his court sublime.

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.