1. Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto thee.

2. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in trouble; incline thine ear unto me: in the day when I call answer me speedily.

3. For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth.

4. My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread.

5. By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.

6. I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.

7. I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

8. Mine enemies reproach me all the day; and they that are mad against me are sworn against me.

9. For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping,

10. Because of thine indignation and thy wrath: for thou hast lifted me up, and cast me down.

11. My days are like a shadow that declineth; and I am withered like grass.

12. But thou, O Lord, shalt endure for ever; and thy remembrance unto all generations.

13. Thou shalt arise, and have mercy upon Zion: for the time to favour her, yea, the set time, is come.

14. For thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof.

15. So the heathen shall fear the name of the Lord, and all the kings of the earth thy glory.

16. When the Lord shall build up Zion, he shall appear in his glory.

17. He will regard the prayer of the destitute, and not despise their prayer.

18. This shall be written for the generation to come: and the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord.

19. For he hath looked down from the height of his sanctuary; from heaven did the Lord behold the earth;

20. To hear the groaning of the prisoner; to loose those that are appointed to death;

21. To declare the name of the Lord in Zion, and his praise in Jerusalem;

22. When the people are gathered together, and the kingdoms, to serve the Lord.

23. He weakened my strength in the way; he shortened my days.

24. I said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of my days: thy years are throughout all generations.

25. Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: and the heavens are the work of thy hands.

3 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.