Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson

I have dwelt on this sequence of stories, one after another, exploring the ways in which the faithfulness of God is manifest in the world of fallen humankind. This kind of interpretation might seem ingenious and little more if there were not essential truths lying behind it. The first of these is that these divine likenesses among whom we live are of the highest interest and value to God. We have been given the coin of wealth to barter among ourselves for the things we need or want. We assign worth to persons, consciously or not, and then to prestige and property and ease, all the things that compete so successfully with the claims of justice and righteousness, kindness, and respect, which would follow from a true belief that anyone we encounter is an image of God. and the second is that we do not know how to judge or where to blame because events are working themselves out at another scale and toward other purposes more than we can begin to grasp.

I had the good fortune to be able to see Marilynne Robinson speak about her now book, Reading Genesis, at the New York Public Library last week. Robinson is, to me, a living avatar of wisdom. She looks wise, with her leonine gray hair and bearing; she sounds wise, with her quiet and well-measured statements. Reading Genesis, which might be described as a work of theology, seems to me a part of that old and forgotten tradition called wisdom literature, of which Robinson herself perhaps is the last and greatest living practitioner.

Robinson begins by observing that it is trendy to pick Genesis apart. A common viewpoint holds that it is the work of many authors, and that each author's particular political or cultural agenda can be traced in the text. In this way, the text is deconstructed and falls apart; it is a text at odds with itself. So the first thing that Robinson does that is quietly radical--in our times at least--is to read Genesis as a single text, with themes and ideas that animate it from beginning to end. For me, too, this was rather radical, because even growing up in the evangelical church, I don't think I was ever asked to read Genesis, or any book, from beginning to end. I know all the stories here, but seeing them laid out as a single narrative made me understand that I'd been missing something fundamental by dealing with them piecemeal.

What does animate Genesis? For Robinson, it is that fundamental truth which lies at the heart of scripture: that human beings are at the heart of creation. Robinson makes much of comparisons with Babylonian and other Near Eastern literature, like Gilgamesh, many of which have been taken as the "sources" from which Genesis stories, like the flood and the tower of Babel, have been borrowed. But Robinson points out that in these stories, the gods have a tense, inimical relationship with human beings, whose sacrifices they must have in order to eat. The God of Genesis, of course, does not eat; he does not need human beings, yet he created them and the world for their purpose and enjoyment. Genesis is a creation story, and one that places mankind at the center of everything. It's a story that unfolds in the lives of very ordinary people, shepherds like Abraham, Isaac, Joseph; it's through these humble people that God will create a chosen lineage, and through this lineage with which he communes with the entire world. (She asserts also that the family trees of Genesis clearly show that Gentiles are more closely related to the chosen people than one might think; in Genesis, we are all neighbors.)

The other big theme that animates Genesis for Robinson is mercy. She takes exception to the image of the raging, vengeful Old Testament God, and the belief common even among Christians that the God of the New Testament is somehow a different character. Look, for example, at the story of Cain: God spares Cain's life for the killing of his brother, and the famous "mark" that is placed upon his forehead is not actually one of shame, but a kind of protection; it demonstrates that wherever Cain goes he is to be protected from those who wish to slay him for his misdeeds. Cain is the ancestor of the human race, and by saving him from what he deserves--punishment for his murder of Abel--a greater purpose is worked. Robinson notes that this kind of story is told over and over again; characters in Genesis are made to suffer far less than we might think they deserve: Noah, Isaac, the brothers of Joseph.

I often wonder who Robinson writes for. Her firm Calvinism puts her out of step with most of the secular world, and her understanding of scripture certainly doesn't seem to fit in with that of Christian America; I can't imagine Reading Genesis on an endcap at Lifeway, if Lifeway still exists. And yet, the room at NYPL was packed with people who came to enjoy her wisdom. She speaks to some much deeper need in us, I think, to understand the way in which we ourselves are part of a universe that has only become stranger and less familiar in the age of the Big Bang.