#the instructions

[doyouknowthisjewishcharacter]

Do you know this Jewish character?

Gurion Maccabee from The Instructions (book)

I know them

I've heard of them

I don't know them

I know them but didn't know they were Jewish

Voting ended onMar 16, 2025

[jack-ofaces]

if there is anything i am with the boomers on it’s that not EVERY FUCKING THING needs to be digital

[horrifichoodedfigure]

i love video games and thinking about their designs but i feel like i never want to ever make a game because people would just 80% of the content literally in front of them and then ruin the game for themselves and other people

[aussie-twat]

So I’m reading the oldest known literature in human history (The Instructions of Shuruppak, Circa 3000BC) which predates the Epic of Gilgamesh (circa 2100BC, currently oldest known work of poetry/storytelling) and I come across this line:

This gift of words is something which soothes the mind ......; when it enters the palace, it soothes the mind ....... The gift of many words are as beautiful as stars.

And it just makes me want to cry. Something that old, passed from King to his son, something that was immortalised in stones and lost to civilizations and then found and translated.

Because this is something I understand on such a deep level. The words soothe me. Because if the words are on the page in front of me or spoken to someone else in the way it would have been back then, it lessens the pain. By sharing, we lessen the pain and deepen our human experience. We love. We cry. We work together. We feel together.

And that is something as old as civilisation. As old as families and royalty. As old as poems. As old as life itself.

[cannondisabledcharacters]

Today’s disabled character of the day is Scott Mookus from The Instructions, who has Williams syndrome

Requested by Anon

[etirabys]

Adam Levin’s The Instructions is one of those books where I watch the percent read figure in the corner tick up with regret. Almost every part of the ride is deliriously fun, frequently veering into tangents like this one:

And Hashem says, "I will not destroy on account of the ten."

...

The last line of Genesis 18 contains the most significant aspect of the conversation that gets overlooked by scholars: the revelation of Hashem's (if not also Avraham's) final stance on collateral damage. Namely: that some collateral damage is acceptable.

And how much is some? How much collateral damage? At first it seems easy to calculate: 9 parts per the population of Sodom. And scholars do have a rough idea of that population – between 600 and 1200. But then, on second thought, neither Avraham nor Hashem would speak of children as being righteous of wicket (until one comes of age, one's behavior is attributed to one's parents), so scholars must subtract the number of Sodomite males under the age of thirteen and Sodomite females under the age of twelve from the denominator. Scholars don't know this number, but can assume, conservatively (in terms of allowable collateral damage), that the percentage of children in Sodom was equivalent to the percentage of children in Jordan today ≈ 40%, which is relatively low for that region.

So the denominator (the estimated population of Sodom minus 40% of itself) is somewhere between 360 nd 720. The acceptable proportion of collateral damage, then, is somewhere between 9 parts per 360 and 9 parts per 720. Reduced to their greatest common denominators, these proportions become, respectively, 1 part per 40 and 1 part per 80.

In other words: If a scholar were to approach the issue of collateral damage as conservatively as possible, that scholar would conclude that to kill 1 righteous person in the course of killing 79 or more wicked ones is acceptable to Hashem. If, on the other hand, a scholar were to approach the issue of collateral damage as liberally as possible, that scholar would conclude that to kill 1 righteous person in the course of killing 39 or more wicked ones is acceptable to Hashem.

In either case, to say "Hashem treats the righteous with mercy" is omissive.

Hashem treats the righteous with mercy when it is cost-efficient.

[nostalgebraist]

Thanks for being among the few people online who talk about _The Instructions_!

My pleasure!!

It’s my favorite novel and not as well known as it should be.  I’m a bit angry at the publisher for designing the printed book to look so gigantic -- it fits thematically, but it also scares people away, when in fact the raw word count isn’t that big relative to plenty of things people happily read without even making a note of their length (e.g. Game of Thrones).