Becca Rothfeld in Cabinet:
According to medieval Jewish commentaries on the Torah, heaven will be dazzling and dramatic. It will contain chambers “built of silver and gold, ornamented with pearls.” New arrivals will pass through gates guarded by 600,000 angels and bathed in “248 rivulets of balsam and attar.” The righteous will attend elaborate feasts and lounge in lavish gardens. As a rule, paintings of heaven are more vague and more amorphous than paintings of hell, but avuncular artists still stuff them with cherry-cheeked cherubs. In the New Testament, John promises his followers that God’s “house has many rooms.”
I don’t know for sure whether any of this is literal—whether the saved will have real bodies to bathe or eat with, whether the cherubs will dirty any actual diapers. What I do know is that if these are metaphors for anything, they are metaphors for novelty. Whatever life in heaven is really like, even if it does not involve winged babies and banquets, it will never be boring. The many rooms there, be they physical or figurative, will each loom larger than the last.
The Talking Heads seem to reject this common wisdom.
More here.