Comment by staticman2
4 days ago
Over a million words is significantly longer than the bible and it's treated as one work:
"There also used to be a practice on LW of telling newbies who weren't producing good content to come back when they'd read the sequences."
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EauwsXht4jrjTTE9m/reading-th...
One of the things the Bible does particularly well is express ideas succinctly. Yes I know you can pull out exceptions but classically this was interpreted as itself having significance.
Are we reading the same bible? The bible is a super meandering document that repeats itself a bunch and also contradicts itself. (which is to be expected if you assume its some sort attempt at writing down and standardizing an oral myth tradition that came before it)
I don’t think that’s what the GP meant.
The Bible is fundamentally a collection of different works. Within those works, I generally agree that the ideas are fairly succinct. But because there are multiple documents in the Bible which cover roughly the same events, it kind of necessarily isn’t succinct as a single cohesive document.
In other words, if you rewrote the Bible as a single document, yeah, it’d be like 10% as long. But that isn’t how it was made.
I’m guessing you haven’t read it in Hebrew because the Hebrew is pretty succinct.
As for meandering, the narrative follows people who travel around to different places so I don’t know what you mean. The canon of the Bible doesn’t arrange all the books chronologically. You can read them in chronological order if you want.
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presumably this is somewhat analogous to telling the newbie to go and fetch the tartan paint, or pedal powered wheelchair and the like.
More of a go away and do this thing that will take a long time because we don't want to deal with you at the moment?