Think you know the Book of Genesis? This will make you think again
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Conventional learned commentaries on the first book of the Bible often concentrate on the reconstructed history of the traditions that stand behind the text – traditions reflected in differences of vocabulary, or different attitudes to various figures in the stories. Fundamentalist handling of the text assumes it is plain reportage, and battles grimly to manage the various tensions or contradictions. Marilynne Robinson’s meditation on Genesis takes us to another level altogether. She insists that we read the book as a genuine composition, not an awkward patchwork, asking all the time, “What work is this or that detail doing in the place where it now stands?”
It is very much a novelist’s approach, and all the better for it; the result is a brilliantly fresh reading of familiar stories, highlighting both the small details we might miss and the large-scale shifts in understanding that the storytelling represents. Of course Genesis makes use of Babylonian and Canaanite mythology: what is interesting is what emerges. Robinson shows with great clarity how the biblical narrative decisively moves away from telling stories about the gods towards something very different – stories about how an inescapable but intangible divine presence is encountered by human agents in ways that change how they imagine their entire world.
So creation and flood are not – as in Babylonian epic – stories about battles, feuds and tensions in heaven that spill over on to earth. They show a God who makes the universe simply because he wishes to make something that is good and that causes delight. Human beings are there not to serve God’s supposed needs but to respond to this good world and find their place within it as active and responsible witnesses to the fact of its goodness. They have to work this out in a world of time and growth, and so are vulnerable to error, even betrayal. God permeates the whole of this world of time and change, and yet stands beyond it, steadily and inexorably calling human beings to account.
So too, while the gods of other ancient cultures demand sacrifices to keep them fed and happy, the God of Genesis needs nothing. What he asks for from human beings is not the grotesquely extravagant gesture of piled-up animal – or human – corpses, but “what we might very well withhold”: the witness and gift of justice or of thanksgiving. The terrible story of the sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac, first commanded, then cancelled by God, is a way of saying that the impulse to give God what is most precious is a serious one, but has to be radically reimagined. What is most precious is the self-will that we must abandon. The story (with what to modern eyes seems its cruelty and arbitrariness), is in fact an intensely compassionate intervention in cultural history, undermining once and for all the myth that God can be bribed by our extravagance, or placated by the extreme violence we are prepared to commit for his sake.
But so much of Genesis is not about “intervention” exactly, but about the slow unfolding of moral truth in the chequered lives of highly fallible individuals. As Robinson spells it out, the deepest miracle in the Genesis stories is that the culture in which they were brought together in their present form made no excuses for ancestral folly or even atrocity, needed no illusions about the absolute and intrinsic righteousness of their tribal heroes, but saw their task as tracing God’s consistent, re-creating judgement through the long and serpentine course of human interactions. The magnificent story of Joseph and his brothers is perhaps the most sophisticated and humanly subtle example. What should provoke our wonder and our faith is not a steady stream of marvels and magic, but the fact that the Jewish foundation story does not need to pretend that its heroes are anything other than painfully human.
“It is as if,” writes Robinson, in a stark and timely passage, “America had told itself the truth about the Cherokee removal or England had confessed to the horror of slavery in the West Indies.” But the Jewish belief that this particular community was uniquely engaged with the action of God meant that “every aspect of its history [was] too significant to conceal.” In a world of manically, violently self-justifying national narratives, from the USA to the Middle East to China, this is every bit as revolutionary as when Genesis was first composed. A history “too significant to conceal”: the phrase challenges the shallowness of a lot of current polemic.
However, this is not a book with a single argument to make. It invites us to take time in reading the stories again, in the company of an exceptionally wise and perceptive storyteller, one of the foremost novelists today in the English language. Many readers of Marilynne Robinson’s fiction have spoken of the sense of “authority” that they feel in her writing – the unanswerable clarity of someone who simply points to what is there. She illustrates as decisively as possible the difference it makes when a writer is manifestly more interested in what their attention is drawn to than in their own state of mind or feeling; and this is what is very much in evidence here. Her style as an essayist has always been lapidary and uncompromising. Impatient readers might find it dogmatic, and complain that it does not invite much in the way of dialogue. But she is a writer who clearly believes that dialogue is more than just an easy chat. First, stop and look together at what is being shown you; then digest and respond as best you can, not so much to the one showing you as to the landscape shown.
The book contains as an appendix the entire text of Genesis in the Revised Standard Version. My one serious query was whether Robinson might usefully have chosen another version – either the King James translation, or one of the very adventurous new renderings of recent decades (by scholars like Robert Alter, Mary Phil Korsak) which try to capture more vividly the distinctive flavour of Hebrew idioms. But this choice takes nothing away from the depth and gravity of her reading. This is not an easy or a quick read, but it is a work of exceptional wisdom and imagination, a real model of how to read the biblical text with the eyes of an adult faith.
Rowan Williams is the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Reading Genesis is published by Virago at £25. To order your copy for £19.99,call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
