:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fdev.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2024%2F03%2Freading-genesis.jpg)
Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
MARILYNNE ROBINSON HAS always been a theologian at heart. It’s merely convention that theology today is one among dozens of specialized academic subdisciplines. If that’s what theology is, Robinson doesn’t write like it—and thank God for that. Theology’s mother tongue is prayer and confession, the language of the liturgy, but these aren’t genres so much as modes that transform disparate genres into vehicles of divine discourse. Like Jacob’s Ladder, the traffic runs both ways.
It just so happens that Robinson’s theology has taken shape in essays, novels, and prose so patient and unpatronizing that it’s embarrassing how long one sometimes takes to catch the point. She has been doing this for almost half a century. She has won all the awards, sold all the books, chatted with presidents, and garnered every laurel and medal. She has nothing to prove. And so, having just turned 80, she has chosen to mark the occasion by publishing a commentary on Genesis, the first book of the Torah.
To seasoned readers of Robinson, this will come as no surprise; she has never written for anyone’s approval. Her work is not so much out of fashion as devoid of its possibility. Robinson is fashionless. One of the many marks of this is her lifelong fascination with Moses, his Law and his God. She loves all three without apology. Whether in fiction or nonfiction, she has spent her career seeking to rehabilitate, precisely in and for a secular public, the so-called “God of the Old Testament.” The scare quotes are necessary because nowadays the phrase is a slur, meant to conjure capricious wrath and irrational commands, even though the phrase is synonymous with “the God of the Jews” and “the God worshipped by Christians.” Indeed, it is established church doctrine not only that Jewish scripture is the living word of the Creator of the world but also that Jesus of Nazareth is the Old Testament’s God made man. It is a very strange thing for followers of the one to look askance at the other.
Robinson has labored to draw attention to this strangeness. To make matters worse, she is that least reputable of spokespersons: a card-carrying Calvinist. It is a testament to her art that she has never had trouble finding a hearing. And it is a reminder that our ostensibly secular age is far less closed to religious thought than some of us might expect.
No book of the Bible has been written about more than Genesis. Even today, few adults in the West have never heard of Adam and Eve, of Noah and the flood, of the Tower of Babel; few would fail to recognize the opening words: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
But that only covers the first fifth of the book. The rest of Genesis is devoted to a single family: Abraham, his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob. From Jacob come 12 sons, whose names are the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. Jacob, his sons, and their wives and children—70 in all—make their way to Egypt and settle there. After some centuries, they fall into bondage and cry out for deliverance. God “remembers” his affection for their “fathers” and responds by rescuing them from slavery. This is the tale of the Exodus, found in the second book of the Torah.
Why have Jews and Christians been so eager to understand what came before? What do the odd and often sordid tales of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have to teach us? What draws Robinson to comment, sequentially, on all 50 chapters of Genesis?
Her first answer is this: at a purely literary level, the book is unique. Robinson does not mean that there are no parallels and antecedents in other cultures’ myths and epics. She has in mind two features of the text. One is what she calls “the humanism of Scripture,” or “God’s humanism.” Far from denying the text’s anthropocentrism, she endorses it: “Human beings are at the center of it all.” This is ennobling, of a piece with Genesis’s assertion that each and every human person, body and soul, is created in God’s image. As she elaborates:
The Bible’s “rigorous realism” is then the other feature that so enamors Robinson. “The creators of Genesis are not interested in others’ vices or crimes, only their own.” The patriarchs of God’s chosen people are, at their best, as unheroic as you or I; at their worst, they are doubting, deceiving, self-regarding, and rapacious—also like us. Robinson cannot contain her astonishment at the ancient Hebrews’ willingness to preserve these shameful episodes and dark etiologies. “History,” she writes, “is so much a matter of distortion and omission that dealing in truth feels like a breach of etiquette.”
Robinson’s astonishment pervades the book. It’s infectious. The style is lyrical and leisurely as ever; it is clear that this text is her native soil. Readers unfamiliar with Genesis will see how deeply her novels are suffused with its spirit and major themes. If John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952) is an American retelling of Genesis, then the Gilead quartet (2004–20) forms an American midrash of the same, one refracted by racism, the Midwest, Reformed theology, and Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son. Aside from occasional references to modern physics and contemporary biblical scholarship, Robinson’s commentary might have been written at any time in the last four centuries. Its total frame of reference is the biblical cosmos and the words that render it. There isn’t a hint of anachronism or condescension in her tone. Her only goal is fidelity to the text as it stands.
It is within, through, and in spite of the human—our sacred worth and high calling, our propensity to vice and violence—that God works his will. This is the leitmotif of Genesis, as it is of all of Robinson’s writing. The theological term is providence. Human agency is no illusion, but it is shot through with divine agency. Each is free; each is real; yet neither competes with the other, for they operate on different levels or orders of causality. God gets what God wants, and we do what we like: “This is the irony of providence, that it is served by just those steps that are taken to defeat it.”
Such a claim raises the inevitable question, and Robinson bites the bullet. Reading Genesis opens with this programmatic sentence: “The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil.” Note that she calls it a meditation, not a solution or explanation. As she says later, “the Bible does not exist to explain away mysteries and complexities but to reveal and explore them with a respect and restraint that resists conclusion.”
Perhaps more than any other scriptural book, Genesis fits this description. It shows and only rarely, if ever, tells. It depicts murder, slavery, rape, theft, adultery, deceit, and idolatry. At times, it reads as though its characters knew the Ten Commandments and saw them as a divine dare, a checklist to complete by midlife. “What,” Robinson asks, “is theological about watching domestic malaise and turmoil work its way through these lives?” Answer: “Let us say that God lets human beings be human beings, and that His will is accomplished through or despite them but is never dependent on them.”
Divine providence may be a mystery—it is discerned only in deep retrospect—but it is not amoral. Robinson believes Genesis is written to instruct us, and among its many lessons, one is chief. Moses, which is to say the God of Moses, abhors revenge. Given the crimes and betrayals that pockmark the lives of Abraham’s children, one might expect vengeance to be swift and severe. And yet, she writes, “in every situation in Genesis where revenge seems just and inevitable, no revenge is taken.” God protects Cain, Esau embraces Jacob, Joseph forgives his brothers. Cycles of violence are blocked before they even begin, long before they could start spinning out of control.
Why? One answer comes from the prophet Isaiah, who reports God addressing us mortals: “[M]y thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” As Robinson wrote in a previous book: “Say what you will about ‘the Calvinist God,’ he is not an imaginary friend.” This unlikeness to us, inseparable from a tender solicitousness for us, lies at the heart of Robinson’s reading of Genesis. In her phrase, the will of God entails “a complication of blame.” Divine restraint generates human restraint. Providence (or predestination, as she admits in the closing pages) does not eliminate freedom or culpability from human actions and decisions. Instead, it frames them with transcendent meaning and unknowable purpose, thereby lifting “them beyond the reciprocity of injury and revenge.” Restraint, unmerited forgiveness, is shown to be godlike. Human judgment falls short of divine justice, which is so tempered by mercy as to be a scandal. When we see this restraint applied to others, we call it a miscarriage. When we receive it ourselves, we call it grace.
In Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Marilynne Robinson sees the momentous beginning of divine grace in human history. From them, it radiates outward and onward, down through the centuries; through their story, we may learn from and even imitate this incomparable godlikeness. For this reason, she can say, or rather confess, that in maintaining and handing on the book of Genesis, the Jewish people “have preserved the world’s best hope.”
It just so happens that Robinson’s theology has taken shape in essays, novels, and prose so patient and unpatronizing that it’s embarrassing how long one sometimes takes to catch the point. She has been doing this for almost half a century. She has won all the awards, sold all the books, chatted with presidents, and garnered every laurel and medal. She has nothing to prove. And so, having just turned 80, she has chosen to mark the occasion by publishing a commentary on Genesis, the first book of the Torah.
To seasoned readers of Robinson, this will come as no surprise; she has never written for anyone’s approval. Her work is not so much out of fashion as devoid of its possibility. Robinson is fashionless. One of the many marks of this is her lifelong fascination with Moses, his Law and his God. She loves all three without apology. Whether in fiction or nonfiction, she has spent her career seeking to rehabilitate, precisely in and for a secular public, the so-called “God of the Old Testament.” The scare quotes are necessary because nowadays the phrase is a slur, meant to conjure capricious wrath and irrational commands, even though the phrase is synonymous with “the God of the Jews” and “the God worshipped by Christians.” Indeed, it is established church doctrine not only that Jewish scripture is the living word of the Creator of the world but also that Jesus of Nazareth is the Old Testament’s God made man. It is a very strange thing for followers of the one to look askance at the other.
Robinson has labored to draw attention to this strangeness. To make matters worse, she is that least reputable of spokespersons: a card-carrying Calvinist. It is a testament to her art that she has never had trouble finding a hearing. And it is a reminder that our ostensibly secular age is far less closed to religious thought than some of us might expect.
¤
No book of the Bible has been written about more than Genesis. Even today, few adults in the West have never heard of Adam and Eve, of Noah and the flood, of the Tower of Babel; few would fail to recognize the opening words: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
But that only covers the first fifth of the book. The rest of Genesis is devoted to a single family: Abraham, his son Isaac, and his grandson Jacob. From Jacob come 12 sons, whose names are the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. Jacob, his sons, and their wives and children—70 in all—make their way to Egypt and settle there. After some centuries, they fall into bondage and cry out for deliverance. God “remembers” his affection for their “fathers” and responds by rescuing them from slavery. This is the tale of the Exodus, found in the second book of the Torah.
Why have Jews and Christians been so eager to understand what came before? What do the odd and often sordid tales of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have to teach us? What draws Robinson to comment, sequentially, on all 50 chapters of Genesis?
Her first answer is this: at a purely literary level, the book is unique. Robinson does not mean that there are no parallels and antecedents in other cultures’ myths and epics. She has in mind two features of the text. One is what she calls “the humanism of Scripture,” or “God’s humanism.” Far from denying the text’s anthropocentrism, she endorses it: “Human beings are at the center of it all.” This is ennobling, of a piece with Genesis’s assertion that each and every human person, body and soul, is created in God’s image. As she elaborates:
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. The Lord stands back, so to speak. The text does not blur the unlikeness of the mortal and the divine by giving us demigods. Its great interest is in the children of Adam, who are in every way a mystery, and the singular object of God’s loyalty, which is another mystery.
The Bible’s “rigorous realism” is then the other feature that so enamors Robinson. “The creators of Genesis are not interested in others’ vices or crimes, only their own.” The patriarchs of God’s chosen people are, at their best, as unheroic as you or I; at their worst, they are doubting, deceiving, self-regarding, and rapacious—also like us. Robinson cannot contain her astonishment at the ancient Hebrews’ willingness to preserve these shameful episodes and dark etiologies. “History,” she writes, “is so much a matter of distortion and omission that dealing in truth feels like a breach of etiquette.”
Robinson’s astonishment pervades the book. It’s infectious. The style is lyrical and leisurely as ever; it is clear that this text is her native soil. Readers unfamiliar with Genesis will see how deeply her novels are suffused with its spirit and major themes. If John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (1952) is an American retelling of Genesis, then the Gilead quartet (2004–20) forms an American midrash of the same, one refracted by racism, the Midwest, Reformed theology, and Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son. Aside from occasional references to modern physics and contemporary biblical scholarship, Robinson’s commentary might have been written at any time in the last four centuries. Its total frame of reference is the biblical cosmos and the words that render it. There isn’t a hint of anachronism or condescension in her tone. Her only goal is fidelity to the text as it stands.
¤
It is within, through, and in spite of the human—our sacred worth and high calling, our propensity to vice and violence—that God works his will. This is the leitmotif of Genesis, as it is of all of Robinson’s writing. The theological term is providence. Human agency is no illusion, but it is shot through with divine agency. Each is free; each is real; yet neither competes with the other, for they operate on different levels or orders of causality. God gets what God wants, and we do what we like: “This is the irony of providence, that it is served by just those steps that are taken to defeat it.”
Such a claim raises the inevitable question, and Robinson bites the bullet. Reading Genesis opens with this programmatic sentence: “The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil.” Note that she calls it a meditation, not a solution or explanation. As she says later, “the Bible does not exist to explain away mysteries and complexities but to reveal and explore them with a respect and restraint that resists conclusion.”
Perhaps more than any other scriptural book, Genesis fits this description. It shows and only rarely, if ever, tells. It depicts murder, slavery, rape, theft, adultery, deceit, and idolatry. At times, it reads as though its characters knew the Ten Commandments and saw them as a divine dare, a checklist to complete by midlife. “What,” Robinson asks, “is theological about watching domestic malaise and turmoil work its way through these lives?” Answer: “Let us say that God lets human beings be human beings, and that His will is accomplished through or despite them but is never dependent on them.”
Divine providence may be a mystery—it is discerned only in deep retrospect—but it is not amoral. Robinson believes Genesis is written to instruct us, and among its many lessons, one is chief. Moses, which is to say the God of Moses, abhors revenge. Given the crimes and betrayals that pockmark the lives of Abraham’s children, one might expect vengeance to be swift and severe. And yet, she writes, “in every situation in Genesis where revenge seems just and inevitable, no revenge is taken.” God protects Cain, Esau embraces Jacob, Joseph forgives his brothers. Cycles of violence are blocked before they even begin, long before they could start spinning out of control.
Why? One answer comes from the prophet Isaiah, who reports God addressing us mortals: “[M]y thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” As Robinson wrote in a previous book: “Say what you will about ‘the Calvinist God,’ he is not an imaginary friend.” This unlikeness to us, inseparable from a tender solicitousness for us, lies at the heart of Robinson’s reading of Genesis. In her phrase, the will of God entails “a complication of blame.” Divine restraint generates human restraint. Providence (or predestination, as she admits in the closing pages) does not eliminate freedom or culpability from human actions and decisions. Instead, it frames them with transcendent meaning and unknowable purpose, thereby lifting “them beyond the reciprocity of injury and revenge.” Restraint, unmerited forgiveness, is shown to be godlike. Human judgment falls short of divine justice, which is so tempered by mercy as to be a scandal. When we see this restraint applied to others, we call it a miscarriage. When we receive it ourselves, we call it grace.
In Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Marilynne Robinson sees the momentous beginning of divine grace in human history. From them, it radiates outward and onward, down through the centuries; through their story, we may learn from and even imitate this incomparable godlikeness. For this reason, she can say, or rather confess, that in maintaining and handing on the book of Genesis, the Jewish people “have preserved the world’s best hope.”
LARB Contributor
Brad East (PhD, Yale University) is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. He is the editor of Robert Jenson’s The Triune Story: Collected Essays on Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2019) and the author of four books: The Doctrine of Scripture (Cascade, 2021), The Church’s Book: Theology of Scripture in Ecclesial Context (Eerdmans, 2022), The Church: A Guide to the People of God (Lexham, 2024), and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry (Eerdmans, 2024).
LARB Staff Recommendations
Shells and Spheres of the Self: On Marilynne Robinson’s “Jack”
Ben Libman reviews “Jack,” the fourth installment in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead series.
Thinking About Believing: On Marilynne Robinson’s “What Are We Doing Here?”
Robinson's ideas are beautiful, but are they always persuasive? Nicholas Cannariato on "What Are We Doing Here?"
Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?
LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!