A God’s-Eye View

‘It is the inattentive reader who loses the thread, not I,” wrote Montaigne, that great rambler, the father of the essay in its modern form. Less playful and, befitting her topic, more rigorous, Marilynne Robinson in Reading Genesis nonetheless tempts her reader to wonder whether her train of thought has a clear destination.

Imagine someone sharing, uninterrupted, 60,000 words of observation about the Book of Genesis but offering no chapter titles, subheads, signposts, or map of her itinerary. Robinson discourages any bullet-point summary of either scripture or her book. Too neat a dissection of a text would drain its blood. The author respects her subject, Holy Writ, as a living thing, capable of defying insufficiently examined assumptions about its character.

Neither a monograph nor a typical commentary, Reading Genesis is only as scholarly as it needs to be for the author’s purposes. To note the difference between other genres and the essay is not to disparage the latter. It offers a wide-lens, right-brain perspective that would be hard to accommodate within the confines of a peer-reviewed journal article. Robinson claims no expertise in ancient languages or cultures but is a writer sensitive to history, theology, and religious practice. They inform her fiction as well as her essays, including the longish one that is this book. The novelist makes way for the thinker.

She reads Genesis in the light of her Christian beliefs. They lead her to notice that suffusing the work are values later exalted in the gospel. “I will once more scandalize scholarly norms,” she writes, “by looking to the New Testament for help in understanding” one of the puzzles she encounters: why “the matter of the worship of false gods does not arise in the story of Abraham, where it might seem to have come up almost inevitably.”

Pointing to the altar to an “unknown god” and telling his Athenian audience that the God he preaches is he whom they already worship but in ignorance, Saint Paul stands on a tradition exemplified by “the covenant between the pieces” in Genesis: Abram and the enigmatic Melchizedek, the king of Salem, might be said to have improvised an interfaith rite, although neither of them shows concern that the difference between the divine names they invoke -- Lord (or YHWH) and El Elyon, respectively -- might indicate a religious disagreement. “El Elyon” appears to be a Canaanite cognate of “Elohim,” one of God’s names in the Hebrew Bible, and (though lost in most translations) occurs in connection with “Elohim” in Psalm 78. Melchizedek embodies Robinson’s view of Genesis as an early expression of monotheism and (she doesn’t use the word, but it fits) cosmopolitanism: one God, many languages and nations.

Here come the bullet points, with apologies to the author for the black-and-white reduction of her nuance. Whether her embrace of a Christian theology colors her reading unduly or rather enables her to discern in Genesis certain big ideas implicit in it is a fair question. Whatever its answer, which I think is “It enables her to discern,” four related themes could be said to shape Genesis as she interprets it:

optimism, a presumption that humankind, the earth, and the cosmos are, even in their fallen states, “good,” a word whose sevenfold appearance in the first Creation account sets a tone;

universalism, or what used to be called “the brotherhood of man”;

humanism, a loving examination of people and their relationships with one another as well as with God -- i.e., careful attention to anthropology as well as to theology;

mercy as a signature attribute of God and “nearer than justice to Godliness.”

To elucidate what she thinks must have been striking to the earliest audiences of Genesis, Robinson compares it with Gilgamesh and Enuma Elish, Babylonian works that the author of the First Book of Moses (whether understood as Moses the man or as a school or tradition) may have been influenced by and, in places, almost certainly borrowed from, if only to adapt a popular foreign myth and rework some of the religious or cultural mores that underpinned it. Overfamiliarity with Bible stories in translation combines with relative ignorance of the ancient Near East to blind some readers to the peculiar brilliance of Hebrew scripture.

“The biblical way of telling the story of Creation differs from ambient narratives precisely at the points of their likeness,” Robinson remarks. The observation is astute. “Similar terms are adopted for the purposes of argument, God or gods, El or Elohim being important instances of this. Imagine proponents of different forms of government all using the terms justice or legitimacy. At these points the most important disagreement would occur.” A distinguishing mark of the biblical Creation accounts is their preclusion of “preexisting reality of any kind, an absolute difference from other myth. The Bible ponders the anomaly of time.”

Inquiries into the nature of time tend toward metaphysical speculation, whose spirit Robinson sees animating Genesis, despite a modern “hermeneutics of suspicion,” the assumption that the text reflects primarily petty factional motives and that whatever higher-order thought might have found its way into it is primitive. She finds coherence and complexity in what skeptics dismiss as redundancy or inconsistency. In her first sentence, “The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil,” she invites the suggestion that Genesis contains seeds of later, elaborated theology and moral philosophy and rewards close reading.

“Righteousness is a very important word in Scripture, too little considered by interpreters, perhaps,” she notes in discussing the negotiation between God and Abraham, who pleads for lenience on behalf of Sodom. God plans to annihilate the city for its grievous sin. “Wilt thou destroy the righteous with the wicked?” Abraham asks. No, answers God, if he finds in it “fifty righteous” -- human shields, in effect. By increments, Abraham moves the threshold down to ten.

Even when sought for its own sake, righteousness confers material benefits. It stays the hand of an offended God and is “associated with life that is not doomed to destruction,” Robinson adds. “It can save a city. It can save Creation,” which God spares for the sake of a few dozen tzaddikim, or righteous ones, living among us at any given time, according to a Talmudic tradition, an antecedent to Blackstone’s ratio (“Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”) in modern civil law. Righteousness in scripture is often summoned as a shield against vengeance, frustrating it and approaching vengeance’s natural rival, mercy, a virtue that, again and again, God models for his beloved, the human race.

“Why do human beings exist?” Robinson writes. “To make offerings to Marduk and the gods,” if the pagan narratives were true. “Why do human beings exist? The God of Genesis is unique in His having not a use but instead a mysterious, benign intention for them.” Emotions are ascribed to God in Genesis, though in a fashion muted in comparison with the discourse about gods in surrounding cultures. Biblical anthropomorphism of God may be both a nod to conventions of ancient pious literature and, Robinson suggests, reciprocation of his aspirational divinization of us, whom he made in his image.

From the Flood account, we learn “that God can be grieved and angered, and at the same time that God is and will be faithful, to earth and to Adam. He can change and not change. Immutability is not an inevitable consequence of His nature, as if options were denied Him by philosophical consistency.” For God to have “a stable character” in his interactions with humans “would require that He be responsive to them. In other words, immutability as an attribute of ‘the living God’ makes Him inconstant, neither righteous nor compassionate.” So Robinson makes her case for process theology, though she doesn’t call it that.

She dwells on the motif of a father’s unshakeable love for his son to illustrate her insight into the high place that forgiveness and mercy occupy in Genesis and throughout the Bible: God yields to “His love for the incorrigible -- in Old Testament terms, His Absalom; in New Testament terms, the Prodigal; in theological terms, the lot of us.” Given the frequency of child sacrifice in ancient literature, the story of the binding of Isaac is -- she shakes her head at the dreaded word -- didactic, a lesson in the humaneness, as it were, to which God ultimately resorts: “It should be remembered that the text intends a God’s-eye view, one meant to shape the nations He is creating.”

By favoring Joseph, the elder son of Rachel, the wife he prefers, Jacob sets in motion a drama whose remarkable dénouement serves both as the conclusion of Genesis and as an exclamation point to Robinson’s judgment that, in the end, the work affirms the drive, Godly but also human, to be kind and do good. “As always in Genesis where revenge or punishment is an issue, the demands of justice in the human sense are not satisfied,” she writes. “The whole great literature of Scripture, unfolding over centuries, will proceed on the terms established in this book.”