Reading Genesis

Reading Genesis by the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson is occasionally aggravating, sometimes confounding, but mostly a brilliantly engaging encounter with the text.

The opening paragraph sets her approach. Speaking of the Bible generally, she says that it “is a work of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology is based” (3). She reads Genesis as I believe it should be read: a theological engagement with God and human life. Theology through story: “To say that the narrative takes us through . . . the Fall and the loss of Eden, then the Flood and the laws that allow the killing of animals and of homicides, then the disruption of human unity at Babel . . . 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” (3). Her point is that these stories query divine truth and human life and give us a distinct perspective.

Or, better, distinct perspectives—plural. But before diving into all that, into what Robinson contributes positively to the reading of Genesis, let me pause a moment on the occasional aggravations of the book. These fall into two broad categories: Robinson’s tone-deaf readings of Mesopotamian literature and her pointed and petulant refusal to engage with biblical scholarship.

Robinson is keen to say that the biblical stories are different from and superior to the Mesopotamian stories. This is true—the biblical stories are different—but she never gives the ancient Mesopotamian stories a chance to display their considerable merits. She limits herself to just two accounts: the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Babylonian creation story known by its Akkadian title as Enuma Elish. These two were parts of the late Babylonian canon, but there is much more to be had from the sweep of Babylonian literature: Atraḫasīs, for example, or Adapa or the Eridu Genesis or the king lists. By now, Mesopotamian literature is a field of its own with sophisticated readings of these and other works in the Babylonian canon. Her take on the relationship between Mesopotamian and Biblical Studies is sadly dated.

The second aggravation is her attitude toward biblical scholarship. To me, it smacks of interdepartmental politics. She sounds like someone who has come to dislike the way they teach Bible at, say, the University of Iowa, and so she takes opportunities wherever she finds them to throw verbal darts at her colleagues down the hallway.

It’s all a little tiresome. She asserts that David wrote Psalm 8 without seriously considering why that might not be the case. And she takes Moses to be historical without, again, arguing the case. Does she mean that these books, Genesis through Deuteronomy, were written by someone named Moses at, say, the end of the Late Bronze Age? Not much chance of that, and much of what she says does not fit with that idea in any case.

This matters because her petulance toward biblical scholarship leads her to miss some things in the narratives and to make some silly mistakes. She misses, for example, how Genesis 1 and Genesis 2-3 play off each other—the way the one changes how we read the other. And in the category of mistakes, she says more than once that the Enoch (son of Jared in the line of Seth) who didn’t die (Genesis 5:24) is the son of Cain (56; see Genesis 4:17), which he is not.

But these are aggravations and occasional. For the most part Robinson’s reading of Genesis is insightful in ways that few readings of Genesis are. She reads Genesis as someone who writes stories herself and who knows how stories work, literarily. She takes the writers seriously as writers.

In her reading, Robinson gives prominence to Genesis 1, believing it elevated above the rest. “Nothing in antiquity,” she says, “could provide a context that would make it less singular.” She has in mind the way that Genesis opens to later theology and to modern science.  “Words like omniscience, omnipotence, transcendence, and immanence,” she says, “can enter theology, language about God, because the Old Testament makes and maintains” distinctions between God and creation. She calls Genesis 1 an elegant metaphysical poem and adds, “Our most contemporary cosmologists might say that the utterances of God [in Genesis 1] are information and the moon and stars and the sea creatures are the hologram, at a sharp loss in poetry and implication.”

Perhaps, but the heart of the book is not Robinson’s reading of Genesis 1 but her reading of the Cain and Abel story. It’s this that sets Robinson’s take on Genesis apart. For her the story is not so much about what Cain did as about what God did not do. Faced with the first homicide, God refused to mete out to Cain what Old Testament justice would appear to require: the death penalty. Instead, as Robinson notes, God acts like an indulgent father and “comforts Cain in his grief at not having made an acceptable sacrifice.” She notes that in the story God says nothing to Abel. “The story,” she says, was always about Cain. The sacrifices were of no real importance” (57). What is important in this story and those to follow is God’s love of his errant and willful humans.

Again and again, in situations where humans would require vengeance, God extends grace. Summarizing her argument, she says near the end of the book:

As always in Genesis where revenge or punishment is an issue, the demands of justice in the human sense are not satisfied. God might have killed Cain, Esau might have killed Jacob, Judah might have condemned Tamar to death, and Joseph might have made his brothers feel his anger and his power by letting them and their families starve.

But none of these things happened. God preserves life because on each of these lives something “absolutely consequential” depends. The story requires just these particular people.

God’s humanism is so absolute that one particular Egyptian serving girl must be the mother of the Ishmaelites, one particular Canaanite widow must complete in long anticipation the genealogy of King David. By extension, any one of us, if we knew as we are known, would realize that there was a role that required our assuming it, uniquely, out of all the brilliant constellations of human families.

The place in the Genesis narrative where this perspective—this “humanism” of God, as she calls it—meets its severest and decisive test is in the flood story. Unlike many tellers of the Genesis tale, Robinson takes the flood seriously. Seriously, but not as if it had happened.

In one of her few concessions to scholarship, she suggests that the flood story was borrowed from Mesopotamian sources. This is almost surely true. But although the stories told in the Mesopotamian accounts and Genesis have much in common, they are used to different effect. In the biblical account, the flood story becomes a parable of God’s grace.

She notes that at the end of the story humans have not really changed. If before the flood, “every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts were only evil all the time” (Genesis 6:5), at the end of the flood they were not much better. Old Noah, said to be “righteous in his generation” (Genesis 6:9), exits the ark, gets drunk and naked, and when his sons try to cover him up, curses Canaan, his grandson. There goes the neighborhood.

Humanity has not changed with the flood, but God has. God, who earlier repented of creating the human race (Genesis 6:6-7), now repents of trying to destroy it (Genesis 8:21). Robinson notes:

. . . Something deeper has happened. The Lord, in the thought of His heart, has yielded to His love for the incorrigible—in Old Testament terms, his Absalom; in New Testament terms, the Prodigal; in the theological terms, the lot of us.

It is this divine yielding to love that for Robinson is the great theme of Genesis. For the flood story to be a parable of grace, it can only be that: a parable, a story. It cannot have happened, for if it were to have happened, it would be a horror beyond all horrors. The biblical writers never intended it to be taken as such. “Modern readers struggle with this narrative, asking, as if it were a real event, whether a good God would wipe away almost His whole creation, when the idea of divine goodness could not include such an act.” Instead, the biblical authors have borrowed a narrative through which to see the nature of evil and the response of God to evil. She says: “It is in the nature of these primordial stories that they never really end. They define the terms of everything that follows.”

What they define, above all, is that what we take to be righteousness, justice, is not what God takes to be righteousness: “Measured revenge,” says Robinson, “justice as it is understood among mortals, is rigorously queried in Scripture, challenged in the text by a higher awareness, a knowledge of what could be lost if small earthly dramas of action and reaction foreclosed what might come in the fullness of time.” What might be lost are just those things that we flawed humans produce in the midst of our fallenness: human culture, art, and, yes, writing itself. Genesis is a testament to forbearance of God and to God’s persistent love of actual humanity.

There is much more in this book, gems of observation and interpretation. As someone who has long reflected on Genesis, I found myself again and again drawn by her commentary into deeper reflections on the text. For that I am grateful.