1. So Prince Karu was banished to the hot waters of Iyo. Again when about to be banished, he sang saying: "The heaven-soaring birds, too, are indeed messengers. When thou hearest the voice of the crane, ask my name."

2. These three songs are of a Heaven-Soaring style. Again he sang, saying: "If they banish the Great Lord to an island, he will indeed make the remaining return voyage. Beware of my mat! Mat indeed in words, beware of my spouse!

3. This Song is of a Partly Lowered Rustic style. Queen So-tohoshi presented a Song to him. That Song said: "Let not thy feet tread on the oyster-shells of the shore of Ahine with its summer herbs! Pass there after having made clear!"

4. So when afterwards again, being unable to restrain her love, she went after him, she sang, saying: "Thy going has become long past. I will go, oh! to meet thee. Wait! I can not wait." What is here called yama-tadzu is what is now known by the name of tatsuge.

5. So when in her pursuit she reached the place where Prince Karu was, he, who had been pensively waiting, sang, saying: "Alas! beloved spouse, who settledst the whereabouts of our grave, setting up flags in the great vale, setting up flags in the little vale of Hatsuse the hidden castle! Alas! beloved spouse, whom I see after our many troubles, prostrate like a tsuki bow, standing like an adzusa bow!"

6. Again he sang, saying: "Driving sacred piles in the upper reach, driving true piles in the lower reach of the river of secluded Hatsuse, and hanging on 303 the sacrificial piles a mirror, bunging on the true piles true jewels: if they said that the younger sister whom I love like a true jewel, that the spouse whom I love like a mirror were there, I would go home, I would long for my country."

7. Having thus sung, they forthwith killed themselves together. So these two songs are Reading Songs.

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.