Photo: The cover artwork of 'Reading Genesis' by Marilynne Robinson.
Reading Genesis
By Marilynne Robinson
What might one make of a text thousands of years old, pulled together by writers in a culture very different from our own, to create a mixture of fable and purported historical narrative? The accounts feature people who can experience a relationship with God, but do not always behave well. Have we anything to learn from their stories?
Marilynne Robinson is a distinguished US writer, notable for a sequence of novels that deal sensitively with the spiritual dilemmas faced by people living in the small town of Gilead. Now, in paying respectful attention to the book of Genesis, she presents a powerful case that it has unique qualities that should not be ignored.
Modern scholarship has revealed that the story of Noah’s flood draws upon legends from elsewhere in the Middle East – the Epic of Gilgamesh for example. Yet the Hebrew version displays a different system of values. The gods depicted in Gilgamesh are wrapped up in their own concerns. For them, humans act merely as providers of menial services. Noah, however, finds that God really cares about him. This becomes a recurrent theme. While humans may let go of what God stands for, God never abandons them. With divine tact God accepts humanity for what it is. By God’s mercy, redemption is always possible.
An earlier instance of this came when Cain slew his brother Abel in a jealous rage, because his offering was less acceptable to God. His punishment was to be branded and sent wandering, but not the retribution of death. Robinson points out that God’s power includes the capacity for exercising restraint. Cain was allowed to live, and his descendants like Enoch became worthy members of the Hebrew community.
The riveting story of Jacob runs through much of Genesis, culminating in the tense reunion in Egypt of Joseph with his older brothers. Full of resentment, they had abandoned him in a pit on account of his upstart ways as a favoured son. Robinson brings her considerable skills as a novelist to imagine the psychological complexities of that situation, where Joseph was now in a position of power, culminating in the meeting of the aged Jacob, who had reluctantly been brought into Egypt, with Pharaoh.
She also considers the position of the Hebrew scholars who compiled the text. ‘Crucially, the literature could only have been dependent on deep faith that the community that created, studied, and revered it did so in service to an extraordinary calling, to embed in language a knowledge of God.’ Surely that’s akin to the Friends who are revising Quaker faith & practice, bringing to light both our spiritual inheritance and our present calling.
As an appendix, the book helpfully includes the text of Genesis in the King James version. Going through it again in the light of Robinson’s illuminating commentary leaves one with the sense of awe that it deserves.
