Does writing with less words really make things easier to understand?

I have this side hobby project to write my own translation-slash-interpretation of the bible, using simple language. As i am not proficient in ancient hebrew, it’s mostly vibes-based, using side by side versions and tools to help people like me.

But it turns out writing the bible in simple english is hard. What counts as simple? Do we use terms that had meaning for the ancient hebrew people, but don’t make sense now? Do we keep gendered terminology or obsolete euphemisms?

The new life version translates “vision” as “special dream”. In some ways, that’s not far off, but it still has several problems: first of all, in english at least it sounds weird and maybe a little bit erotic; second it’s not really completely accurate in the first place, because a vision doesn’t have to be a dream; and third, how many languages or people don’t understand the concept of a vision? While i am fairly certain that there must be at least a few cultures without such a concept, i’m also fairly certain that they are pretty fundamental the majority.

I don’t know, these people have probably put more thought into this than me. But i’m not convinced that taking a list of the n most frequently used words in english and limiting yourself to that is a useful practice. There are likely be a lot of words taking up space that aren’t ever used in the bible, and a lot of words used frequently that have to be forced into a vaguely accurate compound.

Maybe limiting the words has utility. But maybe those words should be limited with more of a focus on the work in question, rather than the language as a whole? I don’t know how much more difficult that would make things for the translators.