1. When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before thee:

2. And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite.

3. Be not desirous of his dainties: for they are deceitful meat.

4. Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom.

5. Wilt thou set thine eyes upon that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven.

6. Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats:

7. For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart is not with thee.

8. The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, and lose thy sweet words.

9. Speak not in the ears of a fool: for he will despise the wisdom of thy words.

10. Remove not the old landmark; and enter not into the fields of the fatherless:

11. For their redeemer is mighty; he shall plead their cause with thee.

12. Apply thine heart unto instruction, and thine ears to the words of knowledge.

13. Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.

14. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.

15. My son, if thine heart be wise, my heart shall rejoice, even mine.

16. Yea, my reins shall rejoice, when thy lips speak right things.

17. Let not thine heart envy sinners: but be thou in the fear of the Lord all the day long.

18. For surely there is an end; and thine expectation shall not be cut off.

19. Hear thou, my son, and be wise, and guide thine heart in the way.

20. Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh:

21. For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty: and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.

22. Hearken unto thy father that begat thee, and despise not thy mother when she is old.

23. Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding.

24. The father of the righteous shall greatly rejoice: and he that begetteth a wise child shall have joy of him.

25. Thy father and thy mother shall be glad, and she that bare thee shall rejoice.

10 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.