1. Then Wodate, Chief of the Mountain Clan when appointed governor of the land of Harima, arrived just at the time of a rejoicing for the new cave of an inhabitant called Shizhimu. Hereupon, when the feasting and the drinking were at their height, they all danced in turn. So two young children employed to light the fire sat beside the furnace. These young children were made to dance. Then one of the young children said: "Do thou the elder brother dance first." The elder brother likewise said: "Do thou the younger brother dance first." When they thus yielded to each other, the people who were met together laughed at their manner of yielding to each other. So at last the elder brother danced, and when he had finished, the younger when about to dance chanted, saying: "On the bamboos on the mountain-slopes, behind which are hidden as soon as they appear my warrior-mate's sword, on whose hilt red earth was daubed, for whose cord red cloth was cut, and his red flags that were set up!: Beggarly descendants of King Ichinobe-no-oshiha, august child of the Heavenly Sovereign Izaho-wake, who ruled the Empire as it were cutting the bamboos' roots and bending down their extremities, and like playing on an eight-stringed lute!"

2. Then forthwith Chief Wodate, starting at the sound of these words, and rolling off his couch, drove away the people of the cave; and having set the two princes one on his left knee and the other on right and wept and lamented, he collected the people together, and having built a temporary palace, and set the two princes to dwell in that temporary palace, he sent a courier up to the capital. Thereupon their aunt, Queen Ihi-toyo, delighted to hear the news, made them come up to the palace.

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.