1. Again once when the Heavenly Sovereign going out for amusement, reached the River Miwa, there was a girl, whose aspect was very beautiful, washing clothes by the river-side. The Heavenly Sovereign asked the girl, saying: "Whose child art thou?" She replied, saying: "My name is Akawi-ko of the Hiketa Tribe." Then he caused her to be told, saying: "Do not thou marry a husband. I will send for thee, " and with these words he to the palace. So eighty years had already passed while she reverently awaited the Heavenly Sovereign's commands. Thereupon Akawi-ko thought: "As, while looking for the Imperial commands, I have already passed many years, and as my face and form are lean and withered, there is no longer any hope. Nevertheless, if I do not show the Heavenly Sovereign how truly I have waited, my disappointment will be unbearable;" and so saying she caused merchandise to be carried on tables holding an hundred, and came forth and presented these gifts as tribute. Thereat the Heavenly Sovereign, who had quite forgotten what he had formerly commanded, asked Akawi-ko, saying: "What old woman art thou, and why art thou come hither?" Then Akawiko replied, saying: "Having in such and such a month of such and such a year received the Heavenly Sovereign's commands, I have been reverently awaiting the great command until this day, and eighty years have past by. Now my appearance is quite decrepit, and there is no longer any hope. Nevertheless I have come forth in order to show and declare my faithfulness." Thereupon the Heavenly Sovereign was greatly startled and exclaimed: "I had quite forgotten the former circumstance; and thou meanwhile, ever faithfully awaiting my commands, hast vainly let pass by the years of thy prime. This is very pitiful." In his heart he wished to marry her, but shrank from her extreme age, and could not make the marriage; but he conferred on her an august Song. That Song said: "How awful is the sacred oak-tree, the oak-tree of the august dwelling! Maiden of the oak-plain!"

2. Again he sang, saying: "The younger chestnut orchard plain of Hiketa: o si dormivissem cum ilia in juventa! Oh! how old she has become!"

3. Then the tears that Akawi-ko wept quite drenched the red-dyed sleeve that she had on. In reply to the great august Song, she sang, saying: "Left over from the piling up of the jewel-wall piled up round the august dwelling, to whom shall the person of the Deity's temple go?"

4. Again she sang, saying: "Oh! how enviable is she who is in her bloom like the flowering lotus, the lotus of the inlet, of the inlet of Kusaka!"

5. Then the old woman was sent back plentifully endowed. So these four are Quiet 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.

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