Reading Genesis — Marilynne Robinson’s new insights on the first book of the Bible

Marilynne Robinson is admired in Britain by those who appreciate her sparsely but beautifully written novels and essay collections. But in the US she is a literary superstar, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2005, recipient of the National Humanities Medal in 2012, one of Time magazine’s hundred most influential people of 2016, and celebrated by President Obama.

Raised Presbyterian, Robinson retains her Protestant faith, and her novels over 40 years, from Housekeeping (1980) to Jack (2020), have been attentive to the religious dimension, whether overtly — the pastor in Gilead confronting his mortality — or implicitly, as her characters seek meaning in the details of their daily lives. In the 2009 Terry Lectures at Yale, Robinson addressed the relationship between religion and science, and other essays have explored theological themes.

Unusual among contemporary novelists for being so upfront about her faith and religious interests, Robinson has now turned her attention to the Bible and its opening description of the creation of the world and origin of humanity. Reading Genesis examines the first book of the Bible, which has so deeply influenced what we think about what it means to be human, who God is, and God’s relationship to human beings, whether we are of Jewish or Christian faith, or none.

The result is an elegant, personal meditation on Genesis. It is a book like no other on a biblical text. With no footnotes or bibliography, and no explanatory introduction or conclusion, the reader is invited to make their own way guided by Robinson’s questions, which are marked by her characteristic profundity of thought. The text of Genesis in the King James Version is helpfully included at the end of the book.

Robinson knows her biblical scholarship, and she is no literalist, remarking that to propose anything other than human authorship is “a notable instance of our having a lower opinion of ourselves than the Bible justifies”. The text of Genesis was “the product of reflection and refinement that took place over . . . generations or centuries,” she writes, but she gives no dates or historical details (modern scholarship suggests the eighth century BC as the earliest date for any of the Hebrew scriptures).

Her interest, rather, is in the portraits of God, the cosmos, and human beings that are found in Genesis. She proposes that the God of Genesis is not punitive, as so often presumed, but constant and compassionate. Unlike the impulsive and volatile gods in Babylonian myths, this God is wholly committed to “flawed and alienated” humankind made in the divine image, despite human folly bringing chaos to a world created as wholly good: “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.”

Not all readers will agree with this positive assessment. Surely the God in Genesis punishes disobedient humans? And did these events occur anyway? Robinson, anticipating such questions, comments that we can’t say whether the events happened or not, but notes that some myths, such as a Deluge with human survivors, occur in texts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, and she reminds us that the authors of Genesis were human, “trying to conceptualize something true, that disasters which obliterate life as if it had no value are a factor in human experience”.

Turbulence is introduced into the Genesis Creation by human beings, and it is utterly meaningful

Robinson contrasts the beauty of creation, made by God for human enjoyment, with the destruction wrought by human beings. Of the Flood, she writes: “Turbulence is introduced into the Genesis Creation by human beings, and it is utterly meaningful,” and “humankind is a moral actor in this drama, not simply a victim”. She prompts us to think about the human turbulence at the root of our environmental catastrophe.

The author brings both her faith and her sensibility as a writer to her project. Of the opening line of Genesis (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth”), she comments, “When I think there was a day when a human hand first wrote those words, I am filled with awe.” The sentence, “a masterpiece of compression” — a characteristic of Robinson’s own writing too — “approximates as closely as words allow the instantaneous realisation of an intent, the bringing into being of the diversity of things that make up the world of fundamental human experience”.

It is that world of fundamental human experience that Robinson seeks to elucidate as she tours the reader through Genesis, her novelist’s eye alert for the narrative drama. The building of the tower of Babel, too tall with its top in the heavens, is a symbol for human overreaching. Human jealousy is shot through the story of Abram and Sarai and the Egyptian Hagar who bore Abram children before Sarai could. The destruction of Sodom is a caution against failing to offer hospitality to strangers. The trickery and treachery of rival siblings is epitomised in the stories of Adam’s sons Cain and Abel, of Jacob’s double deception of his older twin Esau, and then of Jacob’s sons against his youngest, Joseph (like father like son in that patriarchal culture).

Genesis is full of “stories that seem far too ugly to be in the Bible,” Robinson writes, continuing, “It is as if America had told itself the truth about the Cherokee removal or England had confessed to the horrors of slavery in the West Indies.”

Why did the authors make no attempt to cover the horrors of their society’s past? Robinson refers not to the nature of that society but rather to its understanding of humankind’s place in the universe, suggesting that if “a people truly believed that it interacted with God the Creator, it might find every aspect of its history too significant to conceal”. Is this a comment on our own secular, western societies’ fumbling attempts to deal with our troubling legacies? Let the reader decide.

Genesis ends with Joseph — heir of the covenant that God originally made with Abraham, promising him and his descendants protection and land if they followed God’s way — whose “dreams play out more beautifully than anyone could have imagined”, comforting, sustaining, and forgiving those who have harmed him. It is the climax that the narrative has been building towards since Cain killed Abel. “I know of no other literature except certain late plays of Shakespeare that elevates grace as this book does,” Robinson concludes.

Robinson’s strange, beautiful, and thought-provoking book is not always an easy read, but I encourage readers of all faiths and none to persist. It gently calls us to think and act differently in our relationships with the world and our fellow human beings. “Righteousness” is what the moral agents in Genesis are called to exercise, and she proposes that for us. “If one could imagine righteousness breaking out in earth’s saddest places, and among the exploiters of violence and poverty, one could anticipate the stable, long-term flourishing of something that deserved to be called life,” she writes.

Reading Genesis reminds us, too, that “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.” It also fully reveals the gracious God that populates her novels, a prompt to re-read them in this new light.

Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson Virago £25/Farrar, Straus & Giroux $26.99, 352 pages

Jane Shaw is Professor of the History of Religion at the University of Oxford

Marilynne Robinson will be appearing at the FT Weekend Festival: US Edition in Washington DC on Saturday May 4. Details at: usftweekendfestival.live.ft.com

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