What if John Ames’s sermons on Genesis were gathered in one volume?
Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024. 352 pp., $29.00
Being asked to review a work by Marilynne Robinson feels a bit like asking Pierre Rode to review Mozart, except the analogy gives far too much credit to the present reviewer. Robinson holds a Pulitzer Prize (for her novel Gilead), a National Humanities Medal, and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. She is a renowned nonfiction essayist and now the author of a clear labor of love: Reading Genesis, a step into the intersection of literary analysis and theology.
For much of the twentieth century, the Documentary Hypothesis (also known as JEDP or source criticism) reigned supreme in critical academic scholarship on the Pentateuch. Critical scholarship almost uniformly saw Genesis as the product of merely human composition, the result of the combination of at least four sources to produce the text the Jews call Torah and Christians call Pentateuch. Fundamentalism rose in response, reasserting traditional approaches to the text, but often with a harder rhetorical bite.
As Robinson reads Genesis, she steers a course between the Scylla of the fundamentalists and the Charybdis of the skeptics, viewing Genesis as the product of “generations or centuries” of reflection and refinement, yet essentially Mosaic in authorship. Accordingly, the fundamentalists will be disturbed by the details of her analysis, while the skeptics will be disturbed by her assumptions and main points. The fundamentalists need to know that Robinson reads Genesis with love and reverence for the text. She is not a biologist who has lost the ability to see the beauty of a flower but rather a Christian interpreter, one whose own faith is deeply formed by the biblical narrative. Correspondingly, the critical scholars need to know that she reads outside the conservative religious echo chamber, asking different questions—including ones that might normally be taboo in many church communities.
Replacing the bipolarity of the debate between the critics and the fundamentalists with a third way is certainly welcome; it may just not be as new as Robinson’s analysis may imply. An unthinking, even anti-intellectual fundamentalism undoubtedly remains strong in many church traditions, and many Old Testament scholars still adhere to source criticism in various forms. Nonetheless, the scholars with whom Robinson shadow boxes are increasingly not those leading the academy, where source criticism is at a nadir in many scholarly contexts. Beginning in the 1970s, various scholars engaging in a new literary and narrative criticism began to undermine the theory’s foundations, and the text of Genesis (and beyond) is now commonly taught to be the product of various fragmentary or agglutinative approaches, not the combination of the four traditional sources.
Nonetheless, even in this very area Robinson’s reading of Genesis remains valuable because even if the modern academy has left behind the twentieth-century source critical consensus, no new consensus has replaced it. And die-hard source critics remain. The need for Robinson’s third way is quite apparent in the modern American religious landscape.
Nor does this observation indicate that Robinson simply duplicates more recent scholarly approaches to Genesis. Far from it. The notion of Moses as a historical figure giving the Law from God to Israel would still be a scholarly affront in many departments. If anything, the more modern scholarly approaches to the text of the Pentateuch have pushed its origin later in time, to the Persian and even Hellenistic period.
Robinson also has a different goal. The professors want to know how the text of Genesis came to be. Robinson wants to know what it means. She gives her purpose in writing near the end: “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.” The essence of her analysis comes down to two truths: God cares deeply about human beings made in God’s image, and the events of human history are working out in a scale and direction we cannot grasp. In the face of the evident evil in the world, each claim is quite a challenge. Therefore, Robinson’s first words in Reading Genesis give her thesis: “The Bible is a theodicy.”
What Reading Genesis actually is defies easy categorization. It is not quite a monograph, not quite a commentary, and certainly not a textbook on how to read Genesis oneself. Instead, it is more a set of reflections on major, and occasionally minor, narratives in the text of Genesis, a set of thought pieces put in the order of the biblical book. In the end, Reading Genesis itself reads much like Robinson’s novels—even maybe, just maybe, how her famous character John Ames might have preached through the biblical book Sunday by Sunday.
Given Robinson’s award-winning novels, Reading Genesis also surprises. One might expect a literary analysis of the biblical book, and while that eventually arrives in her analysis of episodes such as the Jacob narrative, the first third or so of Robinson’s reading offers a comparative religions approach, showing how Genesis stands in opposition to the Babylonian creation myths by emphasizing human dignity and divine love, not humanity as a troubling bother to the gods.
Robinson provides much for the theologian and biblical scholar to affirm. As the secondary literature about Gilead has noted, she has clearly read her Calvin, absorbing a deep appreciation for God’s sovereignty in human history, seeing in Genesis a history meant to offer neither human virtue nor heroism but instead God’s loyalty to humankind in spite of humanity’s repeated failures.
Calvin, along with other reformers, held tensions within his theology, simply because the Bible itself teaches as true various propositions that are seemingly incompatible to the human mind. If God is in complete control of history, how can human behavior possibly matter? And how can human beings be responsible for their ethical choices if God has predetermined history? The Bible indicates both are true, and for that reason, so does Calvin. His theological system includes that tension, affirming both truths, not trying to explain away or deny one or the other, what J. I. Packer called “antinomy.” Modern Calvinists, not so much. In particular, the Calvinist revival over the past century in English-speaking Christianity largely has absorbed Calvin’s obvious emphasis on God’s sovereignty and often missed his equally deep emphasis on the importance of human behavior.
Robinson lives in that tension, letting it animate her reading of Genesis. She finds in Genesis the record of God’s sovereignty over human history, controlling all things to work out as God sees fit. And yet, she sees God honoring humanity’s freedom to choose. Somehow, Robinson argues, Genesis teaches that both are simultaneously true, a mystery we must embrace if we want to be true to the text. Because God must exceed humans in complexity, Robinson believes that contradiction and anomaly in Genesis must be embraced, not treated as imperfection or error in the biblical text.
Robinson’s theological sensitivity is not, however, an imposition of theological categories upon the biblical book. She insists, “I am as intent on magnifying the Lord as if I were a painter or composer, but my first obligation in commenting on the text is to be faithful to the text.” Often, Robinson’s literary expertise shines. She emphasizes the importance of larger structures in the text, opposing an atomistic and piecemeal reading of the biblical narrative. For example, she reads doublets in the text—such as the repeated patriarchal misrepresentation “She is my sister”—as invitations to compare the narratives, examples of patterns of behavior. She analyzes intertextually, validly seeing connections such as those between Sodom in Genesis and the Benjamites in the book of Judges. Robinson is at her best when considering the art of characterization, emphasizing, for instance, that Judah’s confession after the incident with Tamar begins to rescue him as a character.
Finally, the Christian theologian will value Robinson’s use of the New Testament to analyze the Old. Even though she knows she will “scandalize scholarly norms,” Robinson views New Testament commentary on the Old as authoritative—meaning, for example, that Romans 1 can help explain the origins of paganism reflected in Genesis. For Robinson, the climax of the entire Bible is Jesus, and therefore Genesis is to be read through the full revelation of the New Testament.
In any book of this nature, quibbles will abound, not the least of which is the use of the KJV as a translation, which occupies the last 114 of the 314 pages of Reading Genesis. Presumably because the KJV text does not require royalties Reading Genesis provides the reader with a magisterial but rather outdated English translation.
More to Robinson’s own work, at the analytical and exegetical level, there are several assertions or cases where Robinson adopts an exegetical line that could be challenged. For instance, Job is said to be an Edomite, likely dependent on the Septuagint’s identification of Job with Jobab from Genesis 36, and Noah’s curse on Canaan is identified with Lamech taking his own vengeance in Genesis 4. The sexual violence in Sodom is acknowledged but minimized in comparison to the lack of hospitality, and she reads Joseph enslaving the Egyptians to Pharoah as the narrative working to show Joseph’s sin and guilt. These and other interpretations are certainly possible, but other interpretations are also possible. In a given passage, many readers will find some alternatives exegetically superior.
In such cases, Robinson is not on an island of her own. She accepts particular traditions and lines of interpretation whose source will be identifiable to the biblical scholar but may not be known to the lay reader, and she does not enunciate and rebut the alternatives. Such a weakness is more a feature of what Reading Genesis is than a critique of Robinson’s writing. One cannot expect all the caveats and precision an extensive biblical commentary would offer, much less the rebuttals of alternative readings. And yet, this leaves the reader often unawares that there may be a different way to take the text, possibly undermining Robinson’s main thesis, though more often simply quibbling at the level of detail in interpretation.
The same dynamic appears with her use of the New Testament. While Robinson uses the New Testament to analyze the Old in the case of Romans 1, when she discusses Cain and Abel she emphasizes Cain’s desire to do well: “It would be hard to argue that Cain’s worship was not offered in good faith, given the potency of his reaction to its inadequacy.” While such an understanding is possible, it seems to cut against Hebrews 11:4: “By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts,” much less 1 John 3:12-13: “We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous.”
Maybe more fundamentally, at least for Genesis 1-11, Robinson is willing to question whether the narratives contain real history: “To say the narrative takes us through these declensions . . . is not to say that they happened or didn’t happen.” Yet, by most readings, the Apostle Paul disagrees in Romans 5, viewing Adam as a historical figure.
Unless Reading Genesis were much larger, of course, one could not begin to develop every insight. Nonetheless, this very feature, its economy, opens Robinson up to the charge of cherry picking. The charitable approach would be to recognize Robinson as giving good illustrations to make her point. Nonetheless, one cannot help wishing this book were three times its size, more of a full commentary.
At the more thematic level, Robinson’s own refreshing contention that the origin of the text is the work of the historical Moses also cuts against her comparative analysis of Genesis 1-2 and the Babylonian creation myths. If the historical Moses were seeking to motivate the Israelites to either leave Egypt or persist in their journey towards Canaan, why would the text of Genesis not contrast with Egyptian creation myths instead of those from Babylon at the other end of the Fertile Crescent? While there were, without doubt, common elements in Ancient Near Eastern religious thought, Egypt itself was a distinct culture. The modern Egyptologist would suggest several Egyptian creation narratives available to choose, and Moses as an educated, trained Egyptian prince should have known at least one or more of them. Debunking the Babylonian understanding of the world and its origins would seem to be a much lower priority for the historical Moses than showing the Hebrew people why the Egyptian rationale for their enslavement was incorrect. And so, based on Robinson’s assumption of essentially Mosaic authorship, the long comparison to the Babylonian myths, standard in most academic classes about Genesis, suddenly rings odd.
Lastly, but possibly most fundamentally, if “The Bible is a theodicy,” and Genesis is the beginning of that theodicy, it is a remarkably poor theodicy. Theodicy is typically defined as the task of reconciling a good and omnipotent God with the presence of evil in the world. Yet the Bible as a whole, and Genesis as its beginning, does not ultimately explain why evil exists, or even how to reconcile it with a good and omnipotent God. In the book of Revelation the Bible simply ends with the good news that evil will be defeated. All will be right, indeed. But almost any Christian parent has had a child ask, “Why did God create Satan, if God knew Satan would become evil? Why did God allow Adam and Eve to sin, if sin is bad?” Neither Genesis nor the Bible as a whole answers those questions at all directly.
As Robinson says, the biblical narrative simply assures the believer that God is in control, that God cares, and that all things will eventually work out for God’s good and right purposes. If so, theodicy may not be the right label for Robinson’s reading of Genesis after all. The message she rightly finds in Genesis is not why evil exists but that God has not given up on humanity even in the midst of it—not an explanation of injustice, but the assurance that God still values and cares for us, in spite of us.
Rev. Dr. Bill Fullilove was the first professor of Reformed Theological Seminary in New York City, where he serves as Professor of Old Testament and Dean of Students. He earned a Ph.D. in Semitic and Egyptian Languages at The Catholic University of America. He also serves as the Principal and Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation, and Culture and as a pastor at McLean Presbyterian Church in McLean, VA.
Image: Raphael, Joseph Explaining Pharaoh’s Dreams