1. Then answered Zophar the Naamathite, and said,

2. Therefore do my thoughts cause me to answer, and for this I make haste.

3. I have heard the check of my reproach, and the spirit of my understanding causeth me to answer.

4. Knowest thou not this of old, since man was placed upon earth,

5. That the triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment?

6. Though his excellency mount up to the heavens, and his head reach unto the clouds;

7. Yet he shall perish for ever like his own dung: they which have seen him shall say, Where is he?

8. He shall fly away as a dream, and shall not be found: yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night.

9. The eye also which saw him shall see him no more; neither shall his place any more behold him.

10. His children shall seek to please the poor, and his hands shall restore their goods.

11. His bones are full of the sin of his youth, which shall lie down with him in the dust.

12. Though wickedness be sweet in his mouth, though he hide it under his tongue;

13. Though he spare it, and forsake it not; but keep it still within his mouth:

14. Yet his meat in his bowels is turned, it is the gall of asps within him.

15. He hath swallowed down riches, and he shall vomit them up again: God shall cast them out of his belly.

16. He shall suck the poison of asps: the viper’s tongue shall slay him.

17. He shall not see the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter.

18. That which he laboured for shall he restore, and shall not swallow it down: according to his substance shall the restitution be, and he shall not rejoice therein.

19. Because he hath oppressed and hath forsaken the poor; because he hath violently taken away an house which he builded not;

20. Surely he shall not feel quietness in his belly, he shall not save of that which he desired.

21. There shall none of his meat be left; therefore shall no man look for his goods.

22. In the fulness of his sufficiency he shall be in straits: every hand of the wicked shall come upon him.

23. When he is about to fill his belly, God shall cast the fury of his wrath upon him, and shall rain it upon him while he is eating.

24. He shall flee from the iron weapon, and the bow of steel shall strike him through.

25. It is drawn, and cometh out of the body; yea, the glittering sword cometh out of his gall: terrors are upon him.

4 more verses…

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.