In her latest book, Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson insists that modern readers have largely misunderstood the literary and theological significance of the Bible.
Among probably the most salient causes of this misunderstanding, she argues, is our tendency to read ancient texts through modern categories—history, myth, fiction, nonfiction—that don’t map neatly onto ancient literature. The result’s a never-ending and mostly unnecessary debate between those that approach Genesis as a catalog of events and people who read it as mythic pastiche, pieced together from various ancient sources.
We get a feel for Robinson’s impatience with this debate in her characterization of the factions warring over Noah’s flood: “One side within the controversy is rebuilding the ark to reveal its seaworthiness, or tramping up Ararat on the lookout for its wreckage. The other sees the story as cribbed and fraudulent.” Both sides, Robinson concludes, are led astray by the identical impulse to guage the veracity of Genesis on the idea of how closely it conforms to historical events.
In fact, as she argues on the outset, “the Bible is a piece of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology relies.” The implication for contemporary readers of Genesis is that once we focus totally on the historicity of the Flood account, for instance, we are inclined to ignore the arrangement of Genesis as a piece of literature designed to grapple with theological questions.
Arranged with artistry
This is just not to say that Robinson doubts whether all of the events represented in Genesis took place or that she fails to think about its compositional history. The goal of Genesis, in her estimation, is just not to supply a play-by-play of primeval events but to provide a theological account of who God is, who we’re, and the way we must always live together in light of that theology. In Robinson’s estimation, then, the book’s literary structure is of utmost importance to its interpretation.
By literary, I don’t mean that she treats the Bible as someway comparable to a novel or another contemporary type of literature. I mean that she is concerned about the composition and final type of the biblical text, in the best way it has been arranged with artistry to speak theological truths about God, humans, and the world.
This literary approach is sensible given Robinson’s status as a contemporary master of the novel and the essay. Her novels have earned quite a few honors, including a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her erudite essays on subjects starting from theology and science to politics and history have made her a stalwart contributor to a number of the nation’s most storied periodicals, religious and otherwise. Literary structure is her craft, and she or he is deeply attuned to how the arrangement of Genesis asks us to read it in certain ways to the exclusion of others.
While Robinson’s emphasis on literary craft may appear to put her within the camp of those that regard Genesis as merely human in its authorship, she harbors no compunction in regards to the incontrovertible fact that Genesis is, no less than partially, a more-than-human text.
The accounts we discover within the Bible “are really far too tough-minded to be the products of bizarre this-worldly calculation,” she points out. “I’m content to imagine,” she notes, “that certain early Hebrews, under the influence of Moses and still pondering the faithfulness of God that they saw within the liberation from bondage, were inspired with a real insight into His nature.”
For Robinson, the incontrovertible fact that the Scriptures are shaped by each divine and human hands presents no contradiction. As she observes, “the Bible itself indicates no anxiety about association with human minds, words, lives, and passions.” This lack of tension—palpable in her prose—is amongst an important dispositions of Robinson’s reading that Christians might seek to emulate. She is just not apologetic in regards to the things that many modern readers find threatening to the Bible’s relevance, reliability, and authority.
Perhaps probably the most potent of those perceived threats is scholarly inquiry into the provenance and composition of Genesis.
Whether engaging the Documentary Hypothesis (the idea that the primary five books of the Hebrew Bible are stitched together from disparate traditions) or comparisons between Genesis and other ancient Near Eastern texts, Robinson maintains that Genesis is a novel and ingenious literary creation composed by humans, inspired by God, and designed to convey the reality about God and his world. Far from being afraid of comparisons with other ancient texts, Robinson contends that Genesis is most obviously unique at these points of contact.
Robinson argues that resonances between Genesis and ancient Near Eastern stories resembling the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh or Enuma Elish constitute the very best proofs of the Bible’s—and its God’s—exceptional nature. This claim is central to her reading and repeated throughout the book: “The Genesis stories, slightly than adopting or appropriating them, as an alternative engage the literatures to which they are sometimes compared, accepting a picture or a term but transforming its meaning inside a shared language of thought.”
Comparing Genesis with other ancient creation accounts, she maintains that “the biblical way of telling the story of Creation differs from ambient narratives precisely on the points of their likeness.” Contrasting Noah’s flood with Gilgamesh’s, she insists that “these two stories differ crucially at their points of similarity.”
Again and again, Robinson demonstrates how theological insights into God’s character are clearest at these points of comparison. The Babylonian notion that humans exist to make offerings to Marduk, as an example, makes the Hebrew God so radically unique. As Robinson states, God is distinct “in His having not a use” for human beings, “but as an alternative a mysterious, benign intention for them.”
Unlike the Babylonian gods, who’re revealed to be quite a few, capricious, and needy, Genesis gives us a God who’s one, purposeful, and infinitely gracious. This graciousness, in Robinson’s reading, seems to be central to the theology of Genesis. The book’s literary structure brings us back to it repeatedly, from God’s forgiveness of Cain to the second likelihood prolonged to humans after the Flood to the various redemptions of Abraham and his descendants.
Along the best way, God’s image-bearers pick up on this divine predilection for compassion and learn to forgive each other. Esau absolves his brother Jacob. Joseph pardons his brothers. Genesis shows that God’s graciousness to us and our must be gracious to 1 one other can’t be overstated. It establishes mercy as foundational to Israel’s lifestyle because the people come up out of Egypt and construct their very own society.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, it seems, is just not like several of the opposite ancient gods in any respect—which suggests that those that would follow him will probably be set other than the remaining of the world as well.
Robinson’s reading of the ancestral history that begins with Abraham in Genesis 12 and ends with the death of Joseph in Genesis 50 traces the needs of this God within the lives of Abraham’s descendants and, notably, within the lives of those not descended from the primary patriarch. The book’s theological emphasis on mercy and forgiveness thus extends to all people. God calls to himself a selected people, but he also rescues Hagar and Ishmael and works through Melchizedek, Abimelech, and others who come from outside the road of Abraham.
God is repeatedly shown to be the God of all people, and Robinson’s deal with the literary arrangement of Genesis reveals that God has had a plan for all people from the start.
Purposeful answers
The great strength of Robinson’s literary approach to the Bible is that it focuses our attention on how a book like Genesis invites us into lifelong reflection on the character of God and his plans for us. It could appear, occasionally, that Robinson sidesteps concerns raised by biblical scholars, but her approach matches the design of the text, which was careful and purposeful in answering the questions of ancient readers.
Modern Christians will profit from spending just a few hours with a book that doesn’t treat the Bible as a “primitive attempt to elucidate things that reason and science would in the middle of time make a real and sufficient account of.” And we’d especially learn something from Robinson’s characterization of Genesis as an attempt to provide a real account of God’s people in light of their convictions about who God is.
Unlike many histories that seek to romanticize and vilify their subjects, Genesis offers unsparing portrayals of a few of its most celebrated heroes and generous portrayals of a few of its most dastardly villains. It suggests that we may be higher prepared to know God if we take seriously the psalmist’s plea for God to look our own hearts and to see ourselves as he sees us. Genesis, on this respect, is actually incomparable.
Matthew Mullins is associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. He is the writer Enjoying the Bible: Literary Approaches to Loving the Scriptures and Postmodernism in Pieces: Materializing the Social in U.S. Fiction.
