Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPReading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson
Marilynne Robinson has spent a lifetime contemplating the riches of the Hebrew Bible. It is her work’s great intertext, a wellspring of her fiction, and the theme of numerous essays. Starting with Housekeeping (1980), whose original title was The Book of Ruth, and proceeding through the essay collections, Robinson has made a career of retrieving and repurposing the Hebrew Bible’s troves of language, imagery, and thought. The best examples of this tendency are “Darwinism” from The Death of Adam (1998), “Open Thy Hand Wide” and “The Fate of Ideas: Moses” from When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), “Memory” in The Givenness of Things (2015), and “Considering the Theological Virtues” from What Are We Doing Here? (2018). Her latest book, Reading Genesis, deepens and expands this tradition of her thought. It solidifies the conclusion that the Hebrew Bible—Genesis in particular—is at the heart of her imagination.
Her central claim is for the uniqueness of Genesis. She argues that Genesis, alone among ancient literatures, offers a unique metaphysical worldview whose elements include a merciful God, the goodness of the material world, and the centrality of individual human lives. She has made this claim before, in the essay “Memory” and elsewhere, but she has never defended this claim through a book-length close reading of Scripture.
The majority of Reading Genesis consists of a commentary, walking readers through the first biblical book from Creation to the Joseph narratives. Rather than a verse-by-verse exegesis, Robinson stitches together brief essays on each of the major narrative units of Genesis. Proceeding in a linear fashion, she holds up each narrative for a close inspection, searching out its beauty and mystery, and how it fits into the larger story of God’s providential history. For those familiar with these stories, the results are often surprising.
Her treatment of the Cain and Abel story is a case in point. After the murder of Abel, Cain is sent into exile and given his famous mark. Robinson writes,
The mark that God gives Cain to protect him from possible avengers is often read as something meant to stigmatize him as a killer, though the text very clearly says otherwise. When he says he fears he will be killed, the Lord says, “‘Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’ And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” For all we know, it could have made him disarmingly beautiful.
(56) [End Page 554]
For those habituated to see the “mark of Cain” as a stigma, it is unsettling and delightful to imagine Cain as “disarmingly beautiful.” For those who conceive of the “Old Testament God” as punitive and wrathful, Robinson foregrounds God’s mercy in the sparing of Cain’s life and God’s allowing him to enjoy the “full satisfactions of the patriarchal life” (56). The effect of her commentary is often defamiliarization. In Robinson’s hands, Genesis breaks free from our sclerotic understandings—the product of centuries of cultural clichés—and becomes something new, something strange and living.
For those familiar with her previous essays on the Bible, Robinson’s method will be familiar. Its key parts are comparative myth criticism and a literary view of biblical language. Regarding myth criticism she writes, “It has been usual for a century and a half for writers on the Old Testament to compare the biblical narratives of Creation with the myths of the surrounding cultures” (10). She agrees with the method—clearly the biblical authors borrow and exchange narrative material from neighboring civilizations— but she does not believe this compromises Scripture. There is, according to Robinson, radical discontinuity between Genesis and the myths of other ancient Near East cultures. She establishes the identity of Genesis by outlining the very different metaphysical assumptions encoded in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Enuma Elish, and other ancient texts.
Her approach to the language of Scripture is primarily literary: Genesis as an epic metaphysical poem. Treating Genesis...
