1. So this Deity had a daughter whose name was the Deity Maiden-of-Idzushi. So eighty Deities wished to obtain this Maiden-of-Idzushi in marriage, but none of them could do so. Hereupon there were two Deities, brothers, of whom the elder was called the Youth-of-the-Glow-on-the-Autumn-Mountains, and the younger was named the Youth-of-the-Haze-on-the-Spring-Mountains. So the elder brother said to the younger brother: "Though I beg for the Maiden of Idzushi, I cannot obtain her in marriage. Wilt thou be able to obtain her?" He answered, saying: "I will easily obtain her." Then the elder brother said: "If thou shalt obtain this maiden, I will take off my upper and lower garments, and distil liquor in a jar of my own height, and prepare all the things of the mountains and of the rivers and give them to thee in payment of the wager." Then the younger brother told his mother everything that the elder brother had said. Forthwith the mother, having taken wistaria-fibre, wove and sewed in the space of a single night an upper garment and trowsers, and also socks and boots, and likewise made a bow and arrows, and clothed him in this upper garment, trowsers, etc., made him take the bow and arrows, and sent him to the maiden's house, where both his apparel and the bow and arrows all turned into wistaria-blossoms. Thereupon the Youth-of-the-Haze-on-the-Spring-Mountains hung up the bow and arrows in the maiden's privy. Then, when the Maiden-of-Idzushi, thinking the blossoms strange, brought them home, the Youth-of-the-Haze-on-the-Spring-Mountains followed behind the maiden into the house, and forthwith wedded her. So she gave birth to a child. Then he spoke to his elder brother, saying: "I have obtained the Mayden-of-Idzushi." Thereupon the elder brother, vexed that the younger brother should have wedded her, did not pay the things he had wagered. Then when the younger brother complained to his mother, his august parent replied, saying: "During my august life the Deities indeed are to be well imitated; moreover it must be because he imitates mortal men that he does not pay those things." Forthwith, in her anger with her elder child, she took a jointed bamboo from an island in the River Idzushi, and made a coarse basket with eight holes, and took stones from the river, and mixing them with brine, wrapped them in the leaves of the bamboo and caused this curse to be spoken: "Like unto the becoming green of these bamboo-leaves, do thou become green and wither! Again, like unto the flowing and ebbing of this brine do thou flow and ebb! Again, like unto the sinking of these stones, do thou sink and be prostrate! "Having caused this curse to be spoken, she placed the basket over the smoke. Therefore the elder brother dried up, withered, sickened, and lay prostrate for the space of eight years. So on the elder brother entreating his august parent with lamentations and fears, she forthwith caused the curse to be reversed. Thereupon his body became sound as it had been before. This is the origin of the term "a divine wager payment."

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.

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