1. When this Heavenly Sovereign made Saho-bime his Empress, Her Augustness Saho-bime's elder brother, King Saho-biko, asked his younger sister, saying: "Which is dearer to thee, thine elder brother or thy husband?" She replied, saying "Mine elder brother is dearer." Then King Saho-biko conspired, saying: "If I be truly the dearer to thee, let me and thee rule the empire," and forthwith he made an eight times tempered stiletto, and handed it to his younger sister, saying: "Slay the Heavenly Sovereign in his sleep with this small knife." So the Heavenly Sovereign, not knowing of this conspiracy, was augustly sleeping, with the Empress' august knees as his pillow. Then the Empress tried to cut his august throat with the stiletto; but though she lifted it thrice, she could not cut the throat for an irrepressible feeling of sadness, and she wept tears, which fell overflowing onto the Heavenly Sovereign's august face. Straightway the Heavenly Sovereign started up, and asked the Empress, saying: "I have had a strange dream: A violent shower came from the direction of Saho and suddenly wetted my face; again a small damask-coloured snake coiled itself round my neck. Of what may such a dream be the omen?" Then the Empress, thinking it improper to dispute, forthwith informed the Heavenly Sovereign, saying: "Mine elder brother King Saho-biko asked me, saying: 'Which is dearer to thee, thy husband or thine elder brother?' So, as I was embarrassed by this direct question, I replied, saying: 'Oh! mine elder brother is the dearer.' Then he charged me, saying: 'I and thou will together rule the Empire; so the Heavenly Sovereign must be slain;' and so saying, he made an eight times tempered stiletto, and handed it to me. Therefore I wanted to cut thine august throat; but though I thrice lifted the weapon, a feeling of regret suddenly arose, so that I could not cut thy throat, and the tears that I wept fell and wetted thine august face. The dream was surely the omen of this." Then the Heavenly Sovereign said: "How nearly have I been destroyed! "and forthwith he raised an army to smite King Saho-biko, whereupon the King made a rice-castle to await the fray. At this time Her Augustness Saho-bime, unable to forget her elder brother, fled out through the back-gate of the palace, and came into the rice-castle.

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.