Fanart rectangle final: Uriel and Sohu from @slatestarscratchpad‘s Unsong. I don’t know how to draw this angel, and this is kind of an uninteresting design? I forget if he’s been physically described. Maybe I’ll angel better at a later time.
“billions of human beings suffering unbearable pain for all eternity”
okay now i’m confused bc unsong seems pretty based on jewish stuff so far but this is very christian, isn’t it? like, i thought you could only spend 11 months in hell according to jewish stuffYeah, it bugged me as well. Unsong’s as Christian as it is Jewish.
I got into some… arguments… about that… in the comments section. Scott yelled at me a bit after I got a little really angry/accusatory.
He later makes it explicit that it’s a monotheistic, but very different from either Jewish or Christian, theology.
It’s more complicated than this.
The very early Biblical Jews seemed to have a really vague concept of maybe there being a placed called Sheol under the earth where the souls of the dead hung out. It seems a lot like Greek Hades (and in fact is translated as Hades in some sources) in that it’s not particularly bad, just dead and lifeless and hopeless. The Bible is very quiet about this and it’s unclear to what degree some other Biblical concept called “Sheol” was influenced by Greek conceptions of Hades during the Hellenistic Age.
At some point, probably under the influence of Greek and Christian stuff, this transformed into the belief in the Olam Ha-Ba (“the world to come”, a good afterlife) and Gehenna (a bad afterlife of punishment). The Talmud says punishment in Gehenna is usually twelve months at most, after which the soul goes to Olam Ha-Ba. But this isn’t absolute and there are a couple of sources that suggest otherwise.
First of all, the Talmud itself clarifies that there are some punishments that involve having “no share in the world to come”, including “heresy, publicly shaming someone, committing adultery with a married woman and rejecting the words of the Torah”. It’s unclear how strictly this is defined, but, like, “publicly shaming someone” alone catches nine-tenths of Tumblr. I think there’s controversy as to whether these people stay in Gehenna forever or disappear into oblivion at the end of their twelve months.
Second, there are some Biblical and apocryphal sources suggesting eternal punishment. The Book of Daniel says that “multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt”, but the Book of Daniel says lots of things and is pretty weird and metaphorical. The Book of Judith (apocryphal, but apocryphal Jewish rather than apocryphal Christian) says that “The Lord, the Almighty, will punish them on the Day of Judgment by putting fire and worms into their flesh, so that they cry out with pain unto all eternity”.
And third, the New Testament itself provides some evidence that Hell was considered eternal during its time. This is what Jesus keeps telling people, and remember that Jesus was working within the Judaism of the time. Jesus’ sermons are framed as reminders (“You already know that Hell is eternal, so don’t go there”) not as didactics (“You might think sinners only go to hell for twelve months, but I’m telling you it’s eternal”).
So there was a common strain of Jewish thought during the Second Temple period (ie the time of Jesus) saying that punishment in Hell might be eternal. That strain ended up in Christianity, and a different strain ended up in modern Judaism (mostly). On the other hand, since Jews lived among Christians for a long time, a lot of Christian beliefs ended up reinfecting Judaism in the same way some modern American Jews end up with Hanukkah bushes. I’ve mentioned before this Hasidic story, where a kabbalist almost sells his soul to a very Christian Devil who wants him in Hell for all eternity. And Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews has a part which is basically Dante’s Inferno with Moses in place of Dante (CTRL+F “Moses visits Paradise and Hell at this link)
So yes, Unsong is a mishmash of Jewish and Christian beliefs, but no more than Judaism and Christianity themselves are both mishmashes of Jewish and Christian beliefs.
UNSONG: An epic corporatepunk tale of Jewish apocrypha that exists entirely to set up the most bullshit puns you’ve seen in your life.
One chapter of Unsong describes a “lost” book of the Bible called Jezuboad which the angels “forgot” to give humanity. An Israelite man named Jezuboad complains that he’s very learned in Torah, but it’s too obscure and full of contradictions, and can God just explain the Divine Plan clearly in plain language? The archangel Uriel appears and says “OKAY, LET ME CLEAR UP ALL OF THIS CONFUSION RIGHT NOW, SO NOBODY ELSE HAS TO WORRY ABOUT IT…” and then the chapter ends, with the implication that the loss of this book is why religion is so confusing.
I didn’t realize this at the time, but this is actually really similar to an actual apocryphal book of the Bible, 2 Esdras. It failed to make it into the Western Bible, but it was preserved as canon by the Ethiopian Church, and a couple of Latin manuscripts of it have survived to the present day.
In the book, the prophet Ezra (the man who rewrote the Bible after it was lost during the Exile) says that despite all his wisdom he still doesn’t understand the divine plan, and asks God to explain a lot of things, especially why bad things happen to good people. The archangel Uriel appears before Ezra and says that that the human mind can’t comprehend God’s ways and so his questions can’t be answered.
I didn’t know any of this when I wrote about Jezuboad, and it’s pretty neat. If you’re interested, the text is available at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/r/rsv/rsv-idx?type=DIV1&byte=3652195. The relevant part starts at 4 Ezra 3.
One of the most fun parts of writing Unsong is seeing things come together that I didn’t intend. And so far the most impressive such “coincidence” has been Malia Ngo’s backstory. I usually don’t like revealing too much of where I’m coming from, but this one is too good not to share.
(spoilers ahead for Chapter 65)
Nixon plays Bach.
Fan art based on Interlude א: The Cracks In The Sky from Unsong by @slatestarscratchpad.
I was actually thinking when I published that chapter “No way that @unsongfanart person is going to make art of this”, but I guess I was wrong.
fan art of Ana from Unsong by @slatestarscratchpad
Freaked out because I hadn’t even described Ana and all I had were brief telepathic messages and you got it exactly right, then remembered it was pretty easy to infer that the girl on the cover picture @luminousalicorn drew me was Ana. Will stop freaking out now long enough to thank you.
zzedar asked:
Any spam comments on Unsong are to be interpreted as part of the text and mined for hidden wisdom.
diffractor asked:
I’m going to avoid answering questions of the form “Does X show up in Unsong” because it’s potentially too much of a spoiler.
A post about Unsong, for any SSC readers who follow this mask here but not that mask there.
Huh. I feel like we’re completely missing each other in some way.
I wouldn’t quite describe the point of Unsong as “art interpretation is stupid and you shouldn’t do it”. I don’t really like somebody pinning me down and demanding I give the exact moral, since I don’t think books should be about an easily verbalized lesson, but if you’re going to put words in my mouth otherwise, then fine.
The first thing it’s about is just that pattern-matching is cool and fun and itself a form of art. There is no art form of “create the best conspiracy theory”, but I think there should be. I think writing that part about American Pie was fun, that reading somebody else doing something like that is fun, and that it’s something that should be more permissible. I play the same game at http://slatestarscratchpad.tumblr.com/post/152824927151/slatestarscratchpad-slatestarscratchpad .
The second thing it’s about is the act of finding meaning in the world. I feel like a richly connected world is somehow more meaningful. George Washington wasn’t *just* crossing the Delaware to fight the British, he was reenacting Moses crossing the Red Sea, and I’m sure there are other similarities to Caesar crossing the Rubicon, and you get this feeling of the world being one big coherent whole, where anything you do in your life could come from the same strand of Adam Kadmon and exist necessarily as a mirror of Washington’s Delaware-crossing. This is hard for me to gesture at, which is why I wrote a book instead of trying to gesture. But I hope that some people understand what I mean when they read the book.
And the third thing it’s about is, I think, the thing you’re pointing towards. It’s an attempt to vaccinate people against apophenia in truth-apt domains. I gave the example of an Atlantean conspiracy theory in Part 17 of my Trump post. I used it because, when I was young, I used to believe in those theories on exactly the sort of evidence I gave there. Teaching myself not to do that was a really hard process that involved internalizing the degree to which an intelligent person could produce a seemingly-overwhelming series of coincidences on demand to support any point they wanted. If one day someone looks at a theory and says “That looks convincing, but not really any more convincing than Aaron’s theory about ‘There’s A Hole In My Bucket,’ and I know Scott made that up for laughs, so maybe this is also made up,” then I’ve done my job.
So it’s not about saying you can’t interpret art. Go ahead and interpret art. But have fun when you’re doing it. And don’t try to do science the same way.
Also, I feel like your complaint about how American Pie really is about religion doesn’t relate to the book. Obviously it uses a lot of religious references (eg ”Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”), and obviously that became grist for the mill. Equally obviously, the idea that James Dean is a reference to James the Just, or that the pink carnation is a reference to the Incarnation, is just silly. There’s no reason to lump both sorts of references together, except to have fun in exactly the way I was doing.
“billions of human beings suffering unbearable pain for all eternity”
okay now i’m confused bc unsong seems pretty based on jewish stuff so far but this is very christian, isn’t it? like, i thought you could only spend 11 months in hell according to jewish stuffYeah, it bugged me as well. Unsong’s as Christian as it is Jewish.
I got into some… arguments… about that… in the comments section. Scott yelled at me a bit after I got a little really angry/accusatory.
He later makes it explicit that it’s a monotheistic, but very different from either Jewish or Christian, theology.
It’s more complicated than this.
The very early Biblical Jews seemed to have a really vague concept of maybe there being a placed called Sheol under the earth where the souls of the dead hung out. It seems a lot like Greek Hades (and in fact is translated as Hades in some sources) in that it’s not particularly bad, just dead and lifeless and hopeless. The Bible is very quiet about this and it’s unclear to what degree some other Biblical concept called “Sheol” was influenced by Greek conceptions of Hades during the Hellenistic Age.
At some point, probably under the influence of Greek and Christian stuff, this transformed into the belief in the Olam Ha-Ba (“the world to come”, a good afterlife) and Gehenna (a bad afterlife of punishment). The Talmud says punishment in Gehenna is usually twelve months at most, after which the soul goes to Olam Ha-Ba. But this isn’t absolute and there are a couple of sources that suggest otherwise.
First of all, the Talmud itself clarifies that there are some punishments that involve having “no share in the world to come”, including “heresy, publicly shaming someone, committing adultery with a married woman and rejecting the words of the Torah”. It’s unclear how strictly this is defined, but, like, “publicly shaming someone” alone catches nine-tenths of Tumblr. I think there’s controversy as to whether these people stay in Gehenna forever or disappear into oblivion at the end of their twelve months.
Second, there are some Biblical and apocryphal sources suggesting eternal punishment. The Book of Daniel says that “multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt”, but the Book of Daniel says lots of things and is pretty weird and metaphorical. The Book of Judith (apocryphal, but apocryphal Jewish rather than apocryphal Christian) says that “The Lord, the Almighty, will punish them on the Day of Judgment by putting fire and worms into their flesh, so that they cry out with pain unto all eternity”.
And third, the New Testament itself provides some evidence that Hell was considered eternal during its time. This is what Jesus keeps telling people, and remember that Jesus was working within the Judaism of the time. Jesus’ sermons are framed as reminders (“You already know that Hell is eternal, so don’t go there”) not as didactics (“You might think sinners only go to hell for twelve months, but I’m telling you it’s eternal”).
So there was a common strain of Jewish thought during the Second Temple period (ie the time of Jesus) saying that punishment in Hell might be eternal. That strain ended up in Christianity, and a different strain ended up in modern Judaism (mostly). On the other hand, since Jews lived among Christians for a long time, a lot of Christian beliefs ended up reinfecting Judaism in the same way some modern American Jews end up with Hanukkah bushes. I’ve mentioned before this Hasidic story, where a kabbalist almost sells his soul to a very Christian Devil who wants him in Hell for all eternity. And Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews has a part which is basically Dante’s Inferno with Moses in place of Dante (CTRL+F “Moses visits Paradise and Hell at this link)
So yes, Unsong is a mishmash of Jewish and Christian beliefs, but no more than Judaism and Christianity themselves are both mishmashes of Jewish and Christian beliefs.
Yeah, it’s worth keeping in mind that Judaism is a very wide-ranging and diverse religious tradition. Modern rabbinic Judaism doesn’t think much of the idea of hell, but there are exceptions even there (@femmeprince can tell you a lot more about that than I can). One can argue that this is not authentic or legitimate Judaism, and certainly many adherents of mainstream Judaism would say so; I don’t really see it as my place to say one way or the other.
There were definitely historical Jewish sects that believed in eternal punishment; as Scott says, that’s most of where the early Christians got the idea. The Book of Watchers (the oldest part of the pseudepigraphic Book of Enoch), dated to around 300 BC (older than some portions of the canonical Tanakh) focused a great deal on a version of Sheol that looked a lot like the Greek Tartarus or the later Christian Hell, as well as being the main source of the idea of demons as fallen angels in Christianity. (It’s also the earliest known use of “Son of Man” as the name for a divine/eschatological figure, and probably the origin of the figure of the Metatron in Judaism.) There’s also some treatment of damnation in the more apocalyptic texts from the Qumran community, like the War Scroll. And once you get to the time of the destruction of the Second Temple, contemporaneous with the rise of Christianity, you start seeing a lot of texts, like The Assumption of Moses and 3 Baruch, that deal with various flavors of eternal punishment.
Basically, this is a friendly reminder from your local religion degree holder to avoid treating the dominant strain of a religion as the only strain.