The characters in Marilynne Robinson’s novels often wrestle with the Bible. Each one’s knowledge of Scripture and theology has a different rhythm shaped by a unique background. For example, in Lila, John Ames sees the world through the logical language of Calvin’s Institutes, but the emotionally difficult parts of Ezekiel and Job shape the interpretive horizon of the titular character, an orphaned young woman who becomes Ames’s bride. When our church book club discussed the book, one participant described it beautifully: “John could speak theologically; Lila could relate to that baby weltering in his own blood” (Ezek. 16:6).
Robinson’s ability to convey biblical themes in her fiction arises from her own study of Scripture, which she displays in her nonfiction offering, Reading Genesis. She presents Genesis as a powerful narrative with an intentional trajectory, developed themes, and a clear purpose.
Her reflections on the first book of Moses reveal the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and writing professor has long wrestled with the Bible’s questions about human dignity, divine sovereignty, and the problem of evil. Robinson masterfully reveals the internal unity and purpose of Genesis even as she neglects its broader, canonical connections.
Reading Genesis
Marilynne Robinson
For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true. According to Marilynne Robinson, both of these approaches preclude an appreciation of its greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture.
Genesis’s Unity
We often encounter the stories in Genesis one by one in Sunday school lessons, our Bible reading plans, or a sermon series. But Robinson refuses to read the text’s narrative sections in isolation from one another. She also rejects the idea that Genesis was stitched together by careless redactors.
When discussing the creation and flood narratives, Robinson observes how “oddly important to Old Testament scholarship” the existence of parallel Babylonian accounts has been (32). Like modernist scholars, Robinson suspects Genesis’s editors drew from contemporary literature, but she sees the borrowing as intentionally subversive.
For example, other ancient Near Eastern epics, like Gilgamesh, are fantastical and mystical. Genesis, by contrast, is domestic. The other accounts center on appeasing gods infuriated with earth’s “intolerably numerous” people (49). Genesis is parochial and personal, displaying how “God realizes His purposes in and through the lives of human beings” (145).
Robinson reads back and forth, interpreting Genesis’s narratives in terms of both what came before and what’s to come. When introducing Joseph’s story, for instance, she writes,
Antagonism between or among brothers has recurred in Genesis, beginning with a first statement of the theme in Cain’s murder of Abel. It is assumed Esau really might kill Jacob. The issue in both cases is a yearning for the blessing and approval of the Father or father, and bitterness that another enjoys it. So Joseph, in the coat that never lets his brothers forget he’s favored, wanders into a perilous situation. (181)
Robinson’s ability to see Genesis’s uniqueness in its historical context and to highlight unity among the book’s thematic threads is Reading Genesis’s major contribution, especially for evangelical readers.
Genesis’s Purpose
Reading the book as a whole, Robinson shows how the features of Genesis’s narratives aim the book toward Israel’s enslavement. This trajectory isn’t anticipated only in God’s explicit prediction (Gen. 15:13–14) but in subtle details like the shape of Joseph’s visions.
“Joseph has something of the Egyptian about him even before he leaves his father’s house,” she observes. His dreams are “like the dreams of the Egyptians, little fragments of allegory with veiled meaning, rather than Hebrew dreams, in which God is a speaking presence” (194). In Egypt, God uses Joseph to rescue his family and all Egypt. But, as Robinson notes, Joseph’s policies also made the entire Egyptian population into Pharaoh’s slaves (218–19).
How do we reconcile both good and evil coming from one act? Does God have a purpose in this complexity? Robinson thinks so. “The Bible is a theodicy,” she writes (3). As such, Genesis is a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotent providence in the face of a world filled with floods, famine, and fratricide. Joseph’s words to his brothers become Genesis’s theme: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20). As Robinson writes, “The character of everything, good fortune and bad, is changed when its ultimate meaning awaits the great unfolding of His intention” (17).
Genesis is a defense of God’s goodness and omnipotent providence in the face of a world filled with floods, famine, and fratricide.
For Robinson, Genesis’s events occur “over a very long span of time during which an acutely singular providence works itself out through human beings who are fallible in various ways and degrees and who can have no understanding of the part their lives will play in the long course of sacred history” (177). In her view, Genesis’s long arc doesn’t resolve the tension between God’s goodness and the great injustices people enact and suffer in a fallen world. After all, the text records murder, worldwide disaster, barrenness, rape, and sexual exploitation. Yet it offers us hope in God’s guiding hand.
Genesis’s Other Horizons
When New York Times reviewer Francis Spufford encountered Reading Genesis’s emphasis on God’s sovereign care for his people, he retorted that Robinson “seems to populate the ancient desert with rather anachronistic Calvinists.” I read Spufford’s critique as an endorsement. But though I found Robinson’s confidence in God’s grace and guidance refreshing, I also consider her interpretive vision too narrow.
Edmund Clowney said each biblical text has three interpretive horizons—its immediate context, the period of revelation within which each passage falls, and the context of the entirety of revelation. Richard Lints later called these, respectively, the text’s textual, epochal, and canonical horizons. In Reading Genesis, Robinson models careful attention to the text’s epochal horizon and introduces readers to many of its literary features. But her reading often misses the trees for the forest.
As Sebastian Milbank observes, Robinson’s “textual analysis . . . is the weakest aspect of the book.” While she pays close attention to Genesis’s broader narrative arc, Robinson regularly confuses the text’s details. For example, she repeatedly says “Cain was the father of saintly Enoch and the ancestor of Noah” (211; cf. 57, 59)—an error that wrongly conflates Cain’s line (Gen. 4:17–24) with Seth’s (Gen. 4:25–5:32).
Though I found Robinson’s confidence in God’s grace and guidance refreshing, I also consider her interpretive vision too narrow.
Sadly, Robinson also gives scant attention to interpreting Genesis canonically. Because she hesitates before looking to Jesus, her answers to Genesis’s theodicy questions are unsatisfying. Robinson traces how Jacob’s reunion with Esau and Joseph’s reunion with his brothers raise “the prospect of punishment that would be appropriate to transgression . . . then steps away from the execution of it” (216). She shows how the tension between justice and mercy in these stories points to God’s own gracious restraint.
But Robinson ignores the mechanics of how justice and mercy relate. Even when she discusses God’s provision of a ram instead of Isaac on Mount Moriah (Gen. 22), she focuses on how Genesis’s account of God’s character differs from the Canaanite religion where child sacrifice was common (116). This is good, but it doesn’t show how Christ’s substitutionary death satisfies God’s holy wrath against sin.
Read Genesis in Light of the Whole
In these faults and strengths, Reading Genesis demonstrates the importance of reading each biblical passage in light of the whole. Like John Ames, Lila, and the other characters in Robinson’s novels, we inevitably bring our own frames of mind when we approach Scripture. So we must be careful not to stand over the text but to let the whole of God’s Word shape us.
As Robinson does so well, we must examine each text’s literary features to understand how it would have been understood by its first hearers. As she fails to do, we must also read each text carefully and in light of how it’s been interpreted canonically, particularly in light of how it testifies to Jesus Christ.