1. Hear this, all ye people; give ear, all ye inhabitants of the world:

2. Both low and high, rich and poor, together.

3. My mouth shall speak of wisdom; and the meditation of my heart shall be of understanding.

4. I will incline mine ear to a parable: I will open my dark saying upon the harp.

5. Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil, when the iniquity of my heels shall compass me about?

6. They that trust in their wealth, and boast themselves in the multitude of their riches;

7. None of them can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him:

8. (For the redemption of their soul is precious, and it ceaseth for ever:)

9. That he should still live for ever, and not see corruption.

10. For he seeth that wise men die, likewise the fool and the brutish person perish, and leave their wealth to others.

11. Their inward thought is, that their houses shall continue for ever, and their dwelling places to all generations; they call their lands after their own names.

12. Nevertheless man being in honour abideth not: he is like the beasts that perish.

13. This their way is their folly: yet their posterity approve their sayings. Selah.

14. Like sheep they are laid in the grave; death shall feed on them; and the upright shall have dominion over them in the morning; and their beauty shall consume in the grave from their dwelling.

15. But God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave: for he shall receive me. Selah.

16. Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased;

17. For when he dieth he shall carry nothing away: his glory shall not descend after him.

18. Though while he lived he blessed his soul: and men will praise thee, when thou doest well to thyself.

19. He shall go to the generation of his fathers; they shall never see light.

20. Man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish.

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.