1. By the Dawn

2. And ten nights,

3. And the Even and the Odd,

4. And the night when it departeth,

5. There surely is an oath for thinking man.

6. Dost thou not consider how thy Lord dealt with the tribe of Od,

7. With many-columned Aram,

8. The like of which was not created in the lands;

9. And with the tribe of Shamod, who clove the rocks in the valley;

10. And with Pharaoh, firm of might,

11. Who all were rebellious to God in these lands,

12. And multiplied iniquity therein?

13. Therefore thy Lord poured on them the disaster of His punishment.

14. Lo! thy Lord is ever watchful.

15. As for man, whenever his Lord trieth him by honouring him, and is gracious unto him, he saith: My Lord honoureth me.

16. But whenever He trieth him by straitening his means of life, he saith: My Lord despiseth me.

17. Nay, but ye for your part honour not the orphan

18. And urge not on the feeding of the poor.

19. And ye devour heritages with devouring greed.

20. And love wealth with abounding love.

21. Nay, but when the earth is ground to atoms, grinding, grinding,

22. And thy Lord shall come with angels, rank on rank,

23. And hell is brought near that day; on that day man will remember, but how will the remembrance then avail him?

24. He will say: Ah, would that I had sent before me some provision for my life!

25. None punisheth as He will punish on that day!

5 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.