"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...
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.
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.
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?