1. I also saw the souls of a man and a woman whom they ever drag, the man to heaven and the woman to hell. And the woman's hand was caught in the knot and sacred thread kusti of the man, and she said thus: 'How is it when we had every benefit in union, among the living, now they are dragging thee to heaven, and me to hell?'

2. And the man said thus: 'Because whatever things I received of the good and worthy and the poor, I also gave them back meaning uncertain; and I practised good thoughts and good words and good deeds; I also heeded God, ad disregarded the demons; and I have been steadfast in the good religion of the Mazdayasnians. But you despised the good and poor and worthy and travellers; you also disregarded God, and you worshipped idols; and practised evil thoughts and evil words and evil deeds; and you have been steadfast in the religion of Ahriman and the demons.'

3. And the woman said to the man thus: 'Among the living, you yourself were completely lord and sovereign over me; and my body and life and soul were yours; and the food and income and clothing which I had, were from you; then wherefore did you not chastise and punish me for it? You have not even taught me, the reason of your goodness and excellence, whereby you might have caused goodness and excellence in me, and so now it would not be necessary to suffer this evil.'

4. And afterwards, the man went to heaven and the woman to hell. And owing to the repentance of that woman, she was in no other affliction, in hell, but darkness and stench. And that man sat in the midst of the pious of heaven, in shame from not converting and not teaching the woman, who might have become virtuous in his keeping.

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.