Review: In ‘Reading Genesis,’ Marilynne Robinson treats the Bible like a great work of literature
Marilynne Robinson (Alec Soth/ Magnum Photos)Considering how often the Bible is characterized as a great work of literature, it is rarely read like one. Few would suggest a piecemeal approach to Crime and Punishment, jumping from chapter to chapter with little regard to the whole, but a book like Genesis is often studied only as a collection of isolated episodes.
In her latest book, Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson argues that such a reading is “so deeply ingrained that the larger structures of the text, its strategies of characterization, its arguments, can be completely overlooked.”
Perhaps Robinson’s concern about missing the forest for the trees explains why she decided not to divide her exploration of Genesis into chapters, sections or even subheadings. It is a bold choice for a book so dense, but at the very least, it forces readers to take in the Scripture as a grand narrative, one that resists easy fragmentation. The result is a meandering journey through Genesis guided by one of the foremost Christian humanists of our age. Robinson’s sharp literary eye and clear, lyrical prose shine new light on some of our oldest stories.
Robinson argues that the early chapters of Genesis tell the story in detail of “a series of…declensions that permit the anomaly” of how human beings, flawed and foolish as we are, are so beloved and exalted by God.
Through her comparison of the Hebrew creation and flood narratives with the Babylonian Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh, Robinson illustrates how distinct the Hebrew story’s insistence upon the goodness of God and creation would have been among other Near East peoples. Her comparative-literature approach reminds modern Western audiences just how radical the notion really is that there is one God who made all things good—and how much responsibility that bestows upon human beings. Since the Hebrews believed all things were made good, human agency is the root of toil, suffering and even natural disaster, as in the story of the flood.
Adam and Eve’s sin leads God to curse the ground but not humanity; our culpability affects the world but never denigrates our being, Robinson insists. She faces our faults dead-on, unflinching in her commitment to humanity: “That human beings were so central to Creation that it would be changed by them, albeit for the worst, is, whatever else, a kind of testament to who we are,” Robinson writes. Human beings are co-creators with God.
Because Robinson constantly jumps back and forth between episodes while drawing comparisons to other Near East literature, reading the first 80 or so pages of Reading Genesis can feel like wading through a “formless void” (Gen 1:2). The structure is sometimes circuitous and difficult to follow, but patient readers will find astute insights on the power and gravity of human agency, and even some hope. After all, our great power points to our divine origins. In her stirring prose, Robinson asks, “If we could step back from the dread we now stir in ourselves and look at all of this with some objectivity, would we not feel awe? Would we not feel struck by how absolutely unlike everything we are, excepting God Himself?”
But Reading Genesis is strongest when it turns to Robinson’s analysis of the lives of Abraham and his descendants. As a novelist, Robinson is most comfortable in the domestic, intimate complexities of human relationships, making her well-suited to tell the story of this remarkable family. As a result, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and the other men and women throughout Genesis are shown to be living, breathing human beings, flawed and complex, who nevertheless play major roles in providential history.
Although Robinson insists on a broad, thematic read of Genesis, she is ever-attentive to the sequence of the narrative in her analysis. For example, she sees Hagar and Ishmael’s exile in the desert and the binding of Isaac as parallel cases, told one after the other. They are commentaries on child sacrifice: two people exercising profound faith, entrusting their sons’ lives to God’s word, only for God to deliver them from harm’s way.
This attention to structure invites sometimes startling revelations. She says, for instance, that Isaac’s journey to find a wife and Jacob being cast out after stealing Esau’s birthright frame Isaac’s life to show his decline in fortune. But she takes this a step further to suggest that it also calls attention to Rebekah’s unhappiness: “Though the text says that Isaac loved Esau and Rebekah loved Jacob, there is really no evidence that Rebekah loved anyone.” And as she traces out Rebekah’s life from Isaac’s arrival to her pregnancy to her relationship with her sons, Robinson makes a strong case that this might be true, and even providential.
And so while Robinson explores the family feuds that exist throughout Genesis, her writing is attentive to God’s presence even in the most silly, self-serving and confounding moments of the book. “The remarkable realism of the Bible, the voices it captures, the characterization it achieves, are products of an interest in the human that has no parallel in ancient literature.” She treats all of Genesis’s “domestic malaise” with deep reverence, because, after all, so does God.
Unfortunately, Robinson’s vastly connective interpretive vision sometimes comes at the expense of accuracy. For example, early in the book she says that the boast of Lamech (Gen 4:23-24) closely mirrors his son Noah’s drunken rage (Gen 9:18-29) in order to comment on humanity’s tendency toward vengeance; it is a powerful insight. The only problem is that Lamech, the boastful descendent of Cain, is not Noah’s father, but rather a distant cousin. Noah’s father is also named Lamech, but he descends from Seth, not Cain.
So her conclusion, over 100 pages later, that “providence would act through the life of Cain to arrive at Noah,” is less of a brilliant callback than a stuttering reminder of Reading Genesis’s shortcomings. A more thorough investigation of Robinson’s claims throughout the book would require a biblical scholar, or at least a bibliography. (At no point does she cite any external source, save the occasional, offhand reference to another book of the Bible. You wonder how she got away with it. You then remember that she wrote Gilead; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelists earn a certain editorial license that theologians lack.)
And yet, from her attention to the intimate, human reality at the heart of Genesis, we gain insight into this family affair that only a once-in-a-generation novelist like Robinson could provide. Noting that “at no point are the actors’ motivations insufficient to account for events, and at no point are their actions out of character,” Robinson concludes, “The story could, no doubt should, function as a theological proof that the earthly and the providential are separate things in theory only.”
God’s will is not dependent on us, but using the unique, fickle motivations of each of his co-creators, God is able to make something great. To anyone who wonders where God could be in such a broken world, Reading Genesis reminds us that this question has always plagued humanity, and God has always drawn near to us anyway. Robinson’s book is an insightful exploration of “the ways in which the faithfulness of God is manifest in the world of fallen humankind.” The stability of the covenant is not due to our worthiness, but to God’s love for human beings.
In her 2004 novel, Gilead, Robinson’s protagonist, the Congregationalist minister John Ames, reflects on how the theologian is never truly separate from the God about whom he or she writes: “I suppose Calvin’s God was a Frenchman, just as mine is a Middle Westerner of New England extraction.” In the same way, Marilynne Robinson’s God is in love with humanity. In all our flaws and folly, power and glory, she insists, “Human beings are at the center of it all.”
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “Abraham and Family,” in the April 2024, issue.
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