1. Afterward, arose Vohuman, the archangel, from a throne made of gold, and he took hold of my hand; with the words 'good thought' and 'good word' and 'good deed,' he brought me into the midst of Ohrmazd and the archangels and other holy ones, and the guardian angels of Zartosht Spitama, Kai-Vishtasp, Jamasp, Isadvastar the son of Zartosht, and other upholders and leaders of the religion, than whom I have never seen any one more brilliant and excellent.

2. And Vohuman said thus: 'This is Ohrmazd.' And I wished to offer worship before him.

3. And he said to me thus: 'Salutation to thee, Arda Viraf, thou art welcome; from that perishable world thou hast come to this pure, bright place.' And he ordered Srosh the pious, and Adar the angel, thus: 'Take Arda Viraf, and show him the place and reward of the pious, and also the punishment of the wicked.'

4. Then Srosh the pious, and Adar the angel, took hold of my hand; and I was led by them from place to place. I also saw the archangels, and I beheld the other angels; I also saw the guardian angels of Gayomard, Zartosht, Kai-Vishtasp, Frashoshtar, Jamasp, and other well-doers and leaders of the religion.

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.