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Reading Genesis with Marilynne Robinson

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The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Housekeeping and Gilead sets her literary eye on the very first book of the Bible. It’s both a commentary and an adventure.

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The best part of Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson is Genesis.

I make this observation sincerely, intending no disparagement of Robinson’s insightful reading of the first book of the Bible. But it was a surprise and delight to pick up Reading Genesis, thumb through it for the first time, and discover that the last third of its 344 pages consists of the book of Genesis itself. What an appropriate, generous, and foreseeing inclusion.

To be sure, most readers of Reading Genesis likely have copies of the Bible already, but it is lovely to have the text being discussed right there at one’s fingertips. Besides, given how wide Robinson’s audience is, some readers of the book may not have the Bible readily at hand. The inclusion of Genesis in the text is not only convenient; it’s generous from a publishing perspective, too, given the considerable costs of printing a book of any length, costs that include paper, ink, shipping weight, and so on. (Presumably, the version included is the King James, not only because of the literariness of the language, but also because copyright permission is not a factor.)

What could be better than reading about Genesis with Genesis bound in the same volume?

Well, one thing that could have been better is for Robinson to have more often and more consistently directed the reader to the specific passages of Genesis (chapter and verse) as she discussed them. Now, Reading Genesis isn’t intended to be a scholarly book (although Robinson is a scholar and writes like a scholar even when writing for a general audience), but Genesis is right there at the back of the book, after all.

On the other hand, so many citations might have diminished what is, perhaps, the most defining feature of Reading Genesis. With few citations, no chapters, no headings, and only sporadic, unmarked section breaks, the book conveys the sense that Robinson is actually sitting down and reading Genesis—we the other readers are simply invited along for the ride. This quality makes for a particular kind of experience. Of course, Robinson brings her characteristic rich, erudite analysis and interpretation to the table, but these and the lack of form serve to foreground the overall sense of a reader who is simply reading.

One ingredient of Robinson’s erudition is her deep knowledge in the literature of the ancient civilizations surrounding the Hebrew culture of the Old Testament. Robinson assumes Genesis borrows from these other works, a position some readers might consider at odds with divine inspiration (although the two positions are not necessarily mutually exclusive). More importantly, in making comparative readings, Robinson finds that it is the gods and myths of those other cultures that come up wanting in light of the account of Genesis.

Indeed, the God of Genesis is a different kind of God altogether. And Genesis tells a different kind of story about His relationship with His people.

One significant example of this difference that Robinson points to is human agency. The Babylonian epics do not address human responsibility, culpability, and moral agency in the way Genesis does, Robinson says. Human beings play a more accessory role to the goings-on of the gods of the surrounding cultures. In contrast, when Adam and Eve disobeyed, doubted, and deceived God, they engaged in “complex acts of the will.” Human agency is essential to the biblical story because “God lets human beings be human beings,” and “His will is accomplished through or despite them but is never dependent on them.”

“God is the good creator of a good creation,” Robinson writes. And this fact “is not a trivial statement” when reading Genesis against other creation stories. The cosmos of the Hebrew Scriptures and the one who created that cosmos are characterized overwhelmingly by “benignity.” Even when things go wrong (which, of course, they do), and even when the will and ways of God are inscrutable or painful (which, of course, they are), goodness, Robinson insists, is inherent within all creation. Unlike the gods of the pagan myths who use and exploit human creatures, the “God of Genesis is unique in His having not a use but instead a benign intention for them.” Even in his judgment in the Flood and his justice at Sodom, God is, in Robinson’s reading, always straining toward mercy, accommodating fallen humanity, seeking reconciliation and restoration.

Such an interpretation would, of course, be objected to strenuously by the likes of Richard Dawkins, who famously declared in The God Delusion that “the God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.” Robinson has directly taken on the views of the New Atheists and other materialists over the years, most notably in her 2010 book, Absence of Mind, and she offers correction to their errors in Reading Genesis, too. She not only extols the complicated character of God as revealed in Scripture, but she takes as historical the characters that fill the pages of the Bible: Moses, Noah, Abraham, David, and the rest. It is also equal parts quaint and awe-inspiring that she capitalizes the masculine pronoun for God, something few style manuals (even in Christian publishing) call for today.

This is not to say that Robinson’s hermeneutical approach will please literalists. As usual, Robinson approaches her faith and the Bible in ways that are sure to vex both theological conservatives and liberals, modernists and skeptics, alike. Writing of the Fall, the Flood, and the Noahic covenant, she asserts, “To say that the narrative takes us through these declensions … is not to say that they happened or that they didn’t happen, but that their sequence is an articulation of a complex statement about reality.”

For Robinson, what is real is more than what is or is not literal. She takes the authors of Genesis seriously if not as literally as others do. “I will speak of ‘the writers’ of the books of Moses because these texts appear to me to have been the product of reflection and refinement that took place over the course of generations or centuries,” she explains. “I take it that in the course of their development the Scriptures were pondered very deeply by those who composed and emended them, and that this created a profound coherency.” On the other hand, to doubt the historicity of Moses “seems tendentious,” Robinson cautions the modernist critic, putting one more of her hermeneutical cards on the table: “I will assume that Moses, he to whom the Lord spoke face-to-face, and his tradition are primary influences on the composition of Genesis.”

The rhetorical posture Robinson adopts in the book is that of the sprezzatura—she brings to her reading not only a vast body of other reading, knowledge, study, theological understanding, and literary history, but with all that learning, a sense of ease, confidence, relaxation, and sheer pleasure. In a theological, literary, and hermeneutical world marked today by anxious turf wars over any disagreement or indeterminacy, Robinson’s approach is refreshing (albeit not infallible), marked by the “faith over fear” that so many Christians profess but lack.

Robinson may bring all her additional reading, predispositions, and doctrinal commitments (she is a Calvinist) to the text (as we all do), but always to the text she returns in order to read.

In her compassionate construal of the heart-rending story of Abram, Sarai, and Hagar (and all the pain and strife that followed), Robinson writes:

Readers can feel that Hagar is unvalued because she is a woman, a maid, a foreigner, and these are indeed the conditions that make her vulnerable to mistreatment by Sarai and Abram. But what actually matters is the value the text finds in her.

Setting up her reading of the Fall of humankind, Robinson’s literary eye rests upon a detail of the narrative that once seen cannot be unseen or forgotten. “This world is suited to human enjoyment,” she writes, then quotes Genesis: “Out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight.” This pleasure is made for the delight of God and humans, Robinson points out. That the tree is pleasant to see, she says, “is an extremely elegant detail.” This “beauty of the trees is noted before the fact that they yield food.” God does not only create this objective quality of the trees, but he further gives human beings “the gifts of apprehension this pleasure requires, which is nothing less than a sharing of His mind with us in this important particular.” This is one way, of course, in which we are made in His image.

Although, as they say, everyone is a theologian, Robinson is a literary critic (as well as a literary writer) before she is a theologian. And Reading Genesis is foremost the work of a literary critic. One should read this book for that, most of all, just as one would read John Milton or C.S. Lewis more for their literariness than their theology. Robinson is at her best when she is simply reading Genesis, bringing to the fore her astute intellect, letting the voluminous library of her mind remain in the background like the ubiquitous bookshelf backdrops for streaming news commentators. She reads with her keen literary eye, spying surprising repetitions, reversals, and parallels woven throughout the narrative, each one laden with meaning and resonance.

Genesis is charged with the grandeur of God. Robinson carries that charge electrically.

Karen Swallow Prior

Karen Swallow Prior, Ph.D., is the author of The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis and On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books, among other titles. Her writing has appeared at Christianity Today, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, First Things, and various other places. In addition, Dr. Prior is a columnist for Religion News Service, a contributing editor for Comment, a founding member of The Pelican Project, and a senior fellow at the Trinity Forum. She and her husband live on a 100-year-old homestead in central Virginia with dogs, chickens, and lots of books.