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The human wasn't particularly religious. Born and casually raised Jewish, but they didn't have strong beliefs in any direction. After all, no point in wondering about hypothetical other realms with angels and demons if it didn't have any bearing on their immediate life.
Then they were pulled into the Devildom unceremoniously for the exchange program, and it occurred to them that maybe they should have paid a little more attention when they had to read the Torah.
Luckily, as it turned out, pretty much everyone they met defied expectations. Solomon didn't strike them as particularly wise (and was a questionable cook, though they suspected that was deliberate), the angels weren't terrifying, and the demons were surprisingly nice and arguably not very corruptive. They managed to make seven pacts with their soul intact, after all.
Still, after all this time spent, they still were curious about a few things.
"Just a purely hypothetical question," the human began cautiously, "would any random copy of the Tanakh—it's also called the Bible, I think—have holy energy? Like, if I brought one here, would it explode or something?"
Simeon and Luke gave the human puzzled expressions as Solomon almost snorted his drink. "What's a Tanakh?"
Oh. That was not really the reaction they expected from actual angels. "Uh. It's made up of the Torah, Nevi'im, and Ketuvim?" More blank looks. "In Christianity I think it's also called the Old Testament?"
"What's Christianity?" Luke asked blankly, and the human almost died on the spot from the absurd hilarity of that question.
"I think I've seen that book around," Simeon said, clearly still confused. "It was published a while ago, wasn't it?"
"Uh. Yes." This was incredible. Possibly the best day of their life, or maybe the worst? It was hard to say. The most absurd, certainly.
Simeon hummed. "I did wonder what it was about, but never got around to reading it. Why would it have holy energy?"
Uhh. The human's eyes shifted and landed on Solomon. "Solomon, could you explain?" There was no way he didn't know what was going on.
Solomon's face shifted through a variety of expressions that featured "please don't pull me into this" and "I know exactly what this is about and I wish I didn't" and "so it seemed like a good idea at the time."
"I'm not… those stories aren't exactly accurate," he said carefully. "More like inspired? Some of them were based on real events and people, but like. Not all of them, you know?"
"Well, yes, I gathered that." They'd been living with actual angels and demons for a while now, they knew not every word was to be taken at heart.
"Wait, so what exactly are we talking about?" Luke asked, perplexed. "There's a book that has stories about Solomon?"
"And a lot of other people," the human contributed helpfully. Solomon looked deeply pained, and then buried his face in his hands.
"For the record, I would like to point out that this was a really long time ago, and nobody was supposed to read it."
Oh. Oh. They knew where this was going, and they didn't know if they loved or hated this development.
Simeon's eyes lit up immediately with understanding. "Oh! So you wrote this book?"
"A little. Maybe. Some of it. Most of it," Solomon mumbled into his hands.
"You said it was called the Tanakh?" Luke asked. He pulled out his phone and opened a search engine. "...Wow, this is really famous."
"That's an understatement," the human said, giggling and slightly losing their mind over this revelation.
Solomon let out a high pitched whine. "I was bored. I may have made some questionable decisions."
"Oh look, there's a bunch of free PDF's of this," Luke said, clicking on a link. "Wait, Solomon, this is long."
"It's so long," the human agreed, nodding.
"May I see?" Simeon asked, leaning over Luke's shoulder. "Solomon, I had no idea you were so proficient in prose."
"Please don't read it, it's embarrassing," Solomon said quickly, trying and failing to pull the phone out of Luke's grasp. "Plus, it has… violence and stuff."
"So much violence," the human said sagely. Solomon gave them a long-suffering look.
"Please stop talking."
"Never."
"I'm curious now!" Luke cried.
"As am I," Simeon said.
The human decided they were enjoying this immensely. "Do the others know about this? I'm sure Diavolo would love to read it."
"You can't tell them," Solomon all but begged.
"Too late," the human said delightedly, already pulling out their phone as a wonderful idea occurred to them. "You know, I always found it kind of boring to read all of this stuff as a kid, but maybe we should form some kind of book club and go through the whole thing as a group. Wouldn't that be a fun bonding activity?"
"Oh, yes," Simeon said eagerly. "This is already quite interesting."
Solomon looked upwards with a defeated expression. "Well, I had a good run."
They were several hours into their impromptu book club reading session and Solomon was regretting every decision in his life that led up to this moment. Things had spiraled, to the point where the local angels and demons jumped into the rabbit hole of trying to find nearly every variation and translation of various stories that depicted them.
And there were a lot.
It was in some ways a relief since now "things Solomon wrote while drunk" were outnumbered by "interpretations of Solomon's drunk writing and/or other stories written by other people," but also terrible because it meant they had so much to get through, and for some reason Solomon had to participate.
"Ooh, I like this one," Asmodeus said eagerly. "It says Solomon and I had a bit of a spat and I threw his ring into the sea."
Solomon remembered that story. He wrote it after he and Asmodeus had a fight over what matching accessories they ought to wear to some formal event, and he was in a sour mood. Not that he was going to admit that.
Mammon squinted at the passage Asmodeus was reading. "That was more than a spat. Some of these writings get real brutal."
"This is all so delightful," Diavolo said as he opened another book that Barbatos handed to him. "I had no idea how famous you all were."
"Come to think of it, I don't see Diavolo in any of these," Belphegor said, squinting. "What's up with that?"
"I hadn't met him yet," Solomon mumbled. He had gotten most of his material either from actually meeting people across the years, hearing Simeon talk about them, or picking up context clues from TSL.
….If he really thought about it, a lot of his writing was in some ways a spinoff of TSL.
Probably shouldn't bring that up.
"It's a rather interesting writing style," Barbatos commented, as if he hadn't known about these books for millennia and periodically teased Solomon about them. He honestly suspected that Barbatos had a hand in them spreading as much as they did, just to mess with him.
"Yeah, it's completely different from your current stuff," Satan agreed. This comment was immediately followed by silence.
"Wait, Solomon, you've written something recently?" Luke asked. Solomon wanted to sink into the floor and die. Maybe Thirteen could arrange something.
"Yes," he said, and then didn't elaborate. Regrettably, Satan was already smirking.
"He wrote a fascinating text on marine environments. It was a very informative read."
Leviathan lunged forward. "You wrote a book about the ocean?"
"And other kinds of aquatic ecosystems," Solomon answered automatically, then he blanched. "Er. I mean. I don't know what you're talking about." This day was just getting better and better, wasn't it.
"So that means you don't recognize these?" Barbatos asked sweetly as he pulled out an entire stack of Solomon's marine ecosystems book. He wasn't even surprised at this point.
"Of course you had that prepared."
"I figured it would come up in conversation, even if it was irrelevant to most of the material here," he replied smoothly.
"Oh! I think this was part of the reading list in my class last semester," the human said excitedly as they grabbed it. "Want to sign my textbook, Solomon?"
Solomon took a deep breath, then exhaled. "I would love to," he said, hoping his voice wasn't betraying the immense suffering he was feeling. Luckily, the attention was briefly diverted when Asmodeus let out a dramatic gasp.
"Ew! This one says I married Lilith!"
"And this one says Lilith is your mom," Mammon said delightedly.
"Okay, I promise I didn't write either of those," Solomon said, which was entirely true. He wasn't sure how that whole thing had happened at all, honestly. Maybe he shouldn't have gotten drunk quite as often back then, though in his defense, alcohol was generally cleaner than water for a good while. Yes, he was immortal, but that was beside the point.
"It really is impressive how many variations there are here," Simeon said.
"Well, you are looking at several thousand years' worth of human history," Solomon said with a shrug. "I hardly had a hand in all of these. Word of mouth changes things, copying things down across different languages distorts them, it's a natural part of language and interpretation."
"It's still extremely funny to me that this whole thing started as a joke," the human said with delight. "I mean, some of these stories have solid takeaways, but still."
Solomon groaned. "You're never going to let me live this down, are you."
"I had to spend part of my childhood reading these stories, so absolutely not."
Wonderful. Just wonderful. At least it could always be worse, Solomon reflected. The group could have found out about the Christian New Testament, which was basically 'Solomon got extremely drunk and bored, part two' featuring an entirely fake character that was more or less a self-insert of himself back in his even more chaotic youthful days.
"Wait, what's this?" Luke asked, as he picked up what was unmistakably the full Christian Bible, and flipped towards the middle. "Who's 'Jesus?'"
…Well, fiddlesticks.