1. Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly him that is in reputation for wisdom and honour.

2. A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left.

3. Yea also, when he that is a fool walketh by the way, his wisdom faileth him, and he saith to every one that he is a fool.

4. If the spirit of the ruler rise up against thee, leave not thy place; for yielding pacifieth great offences.

5. There is an evil which I have seen under the sun, as an error which proceedeth from the ruler:

6. Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place.

7. I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth.

8. He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it; and whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him.

9. Whoso removeth stones shall be hurt therewith; and he that cleaveth wood shall be endangered thereby.

10. If the iron be blunt, and he do not whet the edge, then must he put to more strength: but wisdom is profitable to direct.

11. Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment; and a babbler is no better.

12. The words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.

13. The beginning of the words of his mouth is foolishness: and the end of his talk is mischievous madness.

14. A fool also is full of words: a man cannot tell what shall be; and what shall be after him, who can tell him?

15. The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them, because he knoweth not how to go to the city.

16. Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning!

17. Blessed art thou, O land, when thy king is the son of nobles, and thy princes eat in due season, for strength, and not for drunkenness!

18. By much slothfulness the building decayeth; and through idleness of the hands the house droppeth through.

19. A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.

20. Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber: for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.

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.