Abstract
Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesis is a book without chapters or divisions; an invitation to read it if possible in one long sitting, followed by the text of Genesis in the King James Version, which should also be read, if possible, as an unbroken unity. This is something that we do very rarely to the books of the Bible but only then do you really see how strange the book of Genesis is, seen as a whole, and what it is to read it as a kind of novel, read by a novelist who regards this ancient work as a theodicy – a meditation on the problem of evil.
Unlike most theologians, biblical critics or even the church itself, Robinson takes the human characters of the ancient figures in Genesis, and especially the patriarchs, very seriously in an ancient writing that is clearly described as a work of theology ‘and not simply a primary text upon which theology is based’ (p. 3). The result is a very disturbing sense of the purposes and workings of the Divine in the world. We are used to admitting that Yahweh takes less than perfect human instruments for his purposes – Jacob is the common example – but in Robinson’s book as a reading of these ancient stories they shuffle one after another – Cain, Noah, Abram, Lot, Isaac (who is just plain dull), Jacob, Joseph and the rest – often against the grain of their subsequent reputations and chosen by God despite their tricks and evasions. (On the whole, the women come out of things rather better than the men, although they often seem little more than instruments to ensure the continuity of the race.) In Robinson’s luminous narratives it is against the rather shabby darkness of their ancient world that the goodness of God and of Being stands out.
Robinson brings out exactly what Erich Auerbach in his classic essay ‘Odysseus’ scar’, on the story of the ‘sacrifice’ of Isaac (Gen. 22), denies as present in Hebrew narrative. She brings Abram, Isaac and later Sarai alive as human beings, probing their common humanity and motives. At the same time they do not become great characters as in Homeric or Greek stories. Modern novelists and storytellers, from the extended philosophical narratives of Thomas Mann to the popular stage version of Joseph and his brothers, fail to touch the human fallibility of Robinson’s Joseph – revealed as a rather unpleasantly arrogant youth whose nature, once you see it, makes you almost feel sympathy for his brothers who palmed him off onto passing traders. And yet it is by such means that God’s good purpose in creation is effected, in spite of all. Robinson’s sense of the Genesis narratives resonates with the mysterious properties of narrative as explored by Frank Kermode in his celebrated book The Genesis of Secrecy (1979). Odd characters – like the man whom Joseph meets in the fields as he searches for his brothers – simply come and go for no apparent reason; and over all the accidents and vicissitudes of life there is still the guiding purpose of God and his covenant with human beings.
Robinson’s comparison of Genesis with the early Babylonian epics reveals how strange – and unique – this book of tribal recollections is. Her own reading of Genesis is uncompromising, imaginative and intelligently attentive to detail. This is a book that should be read by all biblical critics – and by all of us as a reminder just how little attention we actually pay to the narrative text itself, and what the radical theological consequences of such close literary readings are. Marilynne Robinson does what Robert Alter tried to do years ago, but, being herself an accomplished novelist, does it a great deal better and less self-consciously. Her book is a remarkable achievement.