1. Afterwards, Srosh the pious and Adar the angel took hold of my hand, and brought me forth from that dark, terrible, fearful place, and carried me to the eternal light, and the assembly of Ohrmazd and the archangels.

2. When I wished to offer homage before Ohrmazd. And he was gracious and said thus: 'A perfect servant art thou, pious Arda Viraf, the messenger of the Mazdayasnians; go to the material world, and as thou hast seen and understood, speak truly to the worlds; for I, who am Ohrmazd, am with thee; everyone who speaks correct and true, I honor and know; so say to the wise'.

3. And when Ohrmazd spoke in this manner, I remained astonished, for I saw a light, but I saw nobody; I also heard a voice, and I understood that: 'This is Ohrmazd'.

4. And he, the creator Ohrmazd, the most munificent of spirits, said thus: 'Speak thou forth, Arda Viraf, to the Mazdayasnians of the world, thus: 'There is only one way of piety, the way of the primitive religion, and the other ways are all no ways. Take ye that one way which is piety, and turn ye not from it in prosperity, nor in adversity, nor in any way; and practice good thoughts and good words and good deeds; and remain in that same religion which, as received by him from me, Spitaman Zartosht and Vishtasp made current in the world; and hold the proper law, but abstain from the improper. And be ye aware also of this, that cattle are dust, and the horse is dust, and gold and silver are dust, and the body of man is dust; he alone mingles not with the dust, who, in the world, praises piety and performs duties and good works.' Perfect art thou, Arda Viraf! go and prosper; since every purity and purification which you perform and keep, and everything which you keep lawfully, and the purification and ceremonial, when you perform them, in like manner, mindful of God, I know them all.'

5. And when I heard those words, I made a profound bow to the creator Ohrmazd. 27. And then, Srosh the pious, conveyed me successfully and courageously to this carpeted place. May the glory of the good religion of the Mazdayasnians be triumphant!

6. Completed in health and pleasure and joy.

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.