1. Moreover Job continued his parable, and said,

2. Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me;

3. When his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness;

4. As I was in the days of my youth, when the secret of God was upon my tabernacle;

5. When the Almighty was yet with me, when my children were about me;

6. When I washed my steps with butter, and the rock poured me out rivers of oil;

7. When I went out to the gate through the city, when I prepared my seat in the street!

8. The young men saw me, and hid themselves: and the aged arose, and stood up.

9. The princes refrained talking, and laid their hand on their mouth.

10. The nobles held their peace, and their tongue cleaved to the roof of their mouth.

11. When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it gave witness to me:

12. Because I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him.

13. The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me: and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.

14. I put on righteousness, and it clothed me: my judgment was as a robe and a diadem.

15. I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame.

16. I was a father to the poor: and the cause which I knew not I searched out.

17. And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth.

18. Then I said, I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the sand.

19. My root was spread out by the waters, and the dew lay all night upon my branch.

20. My glory was fresh in me, and my bow was renewed in my hand.

21. Unto me men gave ear, and waited, and kept silence at my counsel.

22. After my words they spake not again; and my speech dropped upon them.

23. And they waited for me as for the rain; and they opened their mouth wide as for the latter rain.

24. If I laughed on them, they believed it not; and the light of my countenance they cast not down.

25. I chose out their way, and sat chief, and dwelt as a king in the army, as one that comforteth the mourners.

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.