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Comment by lawlit | Hacker News Reader

Can they analyse the bible ? (or any holy book for that matter)

The Bible is written in three different languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek) so running any sort of analysis would be difficult, and in any case I'm not sure what it'd tell us.

Running an analysis on the translation into English would rather depend on what translation you were using. For instance the King James Bible is rather heavy on the now-obsolete "thee/thou" forms, whereas a modern translation isn't.

Perhaps analyzing translations themselves would be fruitful. Compare them to other translations, or to other works by the same authors (for the translator-authors), etc.

The Quran uses the royal-we consistently. It's an entirely big fat condescending lecture cum morality tale.

One of my favorite verses reads "We have created man in the greatest form, we then made him the most deformed" (speaking of decaying corpse)

لقد خلقنا اﻻنسان في احسن تقويم. ثم رردناه اسفل السافلين

No, poor mistranslation there. "We have certainly created man in the best of stature; Then We return him to the lowest of the low, Except for those who believe and do righteous deeds, for they will have a reward uninterrupted." "The Fig" 95:4-6

Thank you for the correction :-)

I'm not a believer but I read the Quran from time to time. Pretty potent stuff. The imagery is rich!

انا صببنا الماء صبا، ثم شققنا اﻻرض شقا. فأنبتنا فيها حبا، وعنبا وغضبا، وزيتونا ونخلا

Until I'd read that I'd not realised what a powerful play the royal we is. It's an attempt to craft the identity of the listener into the project of the speaker. In its own way a hack - it makes for our reasoning via our language processing.

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