Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson is an occasionally aggravating, sometimes confounding, and almost always brilliant engagement with the first book of the Bible. 

The opening paragraph sets her approach to the book. 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 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 ponder, reflect on, and query divine truth and human life, and give us on all of them 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, perhaps petulant, refusal to engage with biblical scholarship. 

Robinson is keen to make the point 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.

More than that, even if for reasons of her own she wishes to limit her reading to the two most readily available accounts, she should have at least given those documents a sympathetic reading. Gilgamesh in particular is all of what she claims for the Bible when she calls it “an articulation of a complex statement about reality.” The Gilgamesh epic’s “statement of reality” is not at all the same as that of the Bible, but it is interesting on its own account, and the biblical accounts and Gilgamesh intersect in informative ways. Robinson’s disparagement of Babylonian literature is won at far too cheap a price.

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 takes Moses to be historical, not explaining what if anything that could mean. 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. Or does she simply mean that these stories, elaborated and passed down, have some historical core? And if so, why is that important to her? For most of the book, she is tuned to the narrative, not to some presumed historical background for it. 

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. If she wishes to identity these two Enochs and these two lines, Cain’s and Seth’s, something that could be done, she should have argued the case. And if she did wish to argue the case, not incidentally, her argument would be materially strengthened by scholarly research on the names in those genealogical lists (and some other features), which seem borrowed from Mesopotamia sources.

But these are only aggravations and only occasional. For the most part Robinson’s reading of Genesis is brilliant, always interesting, and insightful in a way that few readings of Genesis are. She reads Genesis as someone who writes stories. She knows what stories do, and how they do it.

Robinson gives due attention to the Genesis 1 story, explaining it as an opening toward later theology, something too little noticed. It’s not that Genesis 1 itself proposes creation ex nihilo (though she seems to think it does) but that it opens to the possibility of creation ex nihilo. “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, not least in Genesis 1 (42). She later calls Genesis 1 an elegant “metaphysical poem” (145). 

But the heart of Robinson’s reading is not with Genesis 1 or even with the two chapters that follow Genesis 1 but with the Cain story (Genesis 4), which is not usually how Genesis is read. Typically, the Cain story is tucked into readings of Genesis as something of an afterthought—a story about the “consequences” of the “fall story” the chapter before. But Robinson spends time on the story. For her it is a story 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: Cain’s death. Instead, as Robinson puts it, God, acting like an indulgent father, “comforts Cain in his grief at not having made an acceptable sacrifice.” She notes that God says nothing in the story to Abel. “The story,” she says, was always about Cain. The sacrifices were of no real importance” (57).

This refusal of God to act punitively centers Robinson’s take on the theology of Genesis. Again and again, 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 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. (226)

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.

In one of her few concessions to scholarship, she suggests that the flood story was borrowed from Mesopotamian sources (43, 49). This is almost surely true. Details like the Noah’s release of the birds to see if the ground was able once again to sustain life are found only in the Babylonian and the biblical stories, suggesting a literary dependence. 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 (43).

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 flood they were not much better. Old Noah, said to be “righteous in his generation” (Genesis 6:9), exited the ark, he gets drunk and naked. When his sons try to cover him up, he 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 yielding that for Robinson is the great theme of Genesis. For the flood story to be a parable of grace, it can only be 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. (37)

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” (38).

She notes, as a writer would, how the biblical writers take delight in telling the stories, even when the stories themselves describe horrors like the flood. They are aware that what they are doing is telling stories. The stories are full of ironies, humor, and subtle connections. And sees these, where sober-sided theologians have seen only their preoccupations with their own truths.

Robinson goes on to work the theme of God’s grace throughout the rest of Genesis. She emphasizes that in the Genesis narratives God’s providence and human choice come together in ways that compromise neither the presence of the hand of God nor the choice and responsibility of humankind. Genesis takes seriously both the contingent particularity of human life and sovereignty of God. Speaking of the Joseph story with which Genesis concludes, Robinson says,

At no point are the actors’ motives insufficient to account for events, and at no point are their actions out of character. Few elements in this story suggest that divine providence has a part in them, though we know it is active in them all. The story could, not doubt should, function as a theological proof that the earthly and the providential are separate things in theory only. In fact neither can be distinguished from the other or exist apart from the other. (213)

What distinguishes Robinson’s reading of Genesis is that she takes these narratives seriously as theological reflections on the human condition. She does not regard them as primitive, the writings of people who could not understand what we now understand. Nor are they merely data (a term used by Louis Berkhof in speaking of the Bible) for later theologians who, instructed by Western philosophy, are able to reflect on their meaning. These narratives are themselves theologies, reflections in the narrative style, subtle queries into questions the answers for which we search still.

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.

Clay Libolt