1. Alif. Lam. Ra. These are verses of the Scripture and a plain Reading.

2. It may be that those who disbelieve wish ardently that they were Muslims.

3. Let them eat and enjoy life, and let false hope beguile them. They will come to know!

4. And We destroyed no township but there was a known decree for it.

5. No nation can outstrip its term nor can they lag behind.

6. And they say: O thou unto whom the Reminder is revealed, lo! thou art indeed a madman!

7. Why bringest thou not angels unto us, if thou art of the truthful?

8. We send not down the angels save with the Fact, and in that case the disbelievers would not be tolerated.

9. Lo! We, even We, reveal the Reminder, and lo! We verily are its Guardian.

10. We verily sent messengers before thee among the factions of the men of old.

11. And never came there unto them a messenger but they did mock him.

12. Thus do We make it traverse the hearts of the guilty:

13. They believe not therein, though the example of the men of old hath gone before.

14. And even if We opened unto them a gate of heaven and they kept mounting through it,

15. They would say: Our sight is wrong - nay, but we are folk bewitched.

16. And verily in the heaven we have set mansions of the stars, and We have beautified it for beholders.

17. And We have guarded it from every outcast devil,

18. Save him who stealeth the hearing, and them doth a clear flame pursue.

19. And the earth have We spread out, and placed therein firm hills, and caused each seemly thing to grow therein.

20. And we have given unto you livelihoods therein, and unto those for whom ye provide not.

21. And there is not a thing but with Us are the stores thereof. And we send it not down save in appointed measure.

22. And We send the winds fertilising, and cause water to descend from the sky, and give it you to drink. It is not ye who are the holders of the store thereof.

23. Lo! and it is We, even We, Who quicken and give death, and We are the Inheritor.

24. And verily We know the eager among you and verily We know the laggards.

25. Lo! thy Lord will gather them together. Lo! He is Wise, Aware.

74 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.