The award-winning novelist and social critic Marilynne Robinson has turned the focus of her literary intelligence on to the first book of the Bible. Genesis, the foundational imaginative text of western culture, has permeated our art and literature, as well as shaping a whole understanding of life, including politics. Its stories remain at once compelling and mystifying. Some of the stories, most obviously that of a great flood, resemble others from Mesopotamia, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish, but Robinson shows how differently Genesis treats them. There was, she says, no deluge – but the story is a parable to show that although we human beings have made a terrible mess of the world, so much so that we might be tempted to destroy the lot and start again, this is not what God does. He wants life to continue and, despite everything, it remains a blessing.
Although Genesis makes it clear that God desires moral rectitude from human beings, the main characters often reveal themselves to be deeply flawed. Cain is a killer. Abraham tolerates cruelty, Jacob is a liar and twister. The point is that, despite these failings, there is a primal purpose in creation that does not give up on humanity. One of the aspects of Genesis which Robinson brings out strongly is its universality. The descendants of Abraham are to be as numerous as the stars in the sky and in him all the families of the Earth are to be blessed. It is a remarkable fact that today billions of Jews, Christians and Muslims, in their different ways, do regard themselves as children of Abraham.
Robinson’s reading is full of telling details and keenly observed parallels. This enables her to show that what Jews term the binding of Isaac is not a test of Abraham’s faith, but a prohibition of the child sacrifice that occurred in some other cultures, for example in Carthage. Although she is familiar with biblical scholarship and makes use of it where necessary, this work is best seen as a close, attentive reading from a literary point of view. In her approach there is something of the sense of astonishment and marvel that is present in her novels. About the first words of Genesis she writes, “When I think there was a day when a human hand first wrote those words, I am filled with awe. This sentence is a masterpiece of compression.”
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,” Hamlet said to Horatio. That is the conviction that controls the narrative of Genesis, culminating in its closing, when Joseph says to the brothers who tried to murder him, “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”
Robinson makes few concessions to the reader. There is no introduction or conclusion; there are no chapter headings or signposts. She just wants her audience to look again at Genesis and see what they make of it. To that end the Book of Genesis itself is printed at the back, in the Revised Standard Version, the one that still carries the cadences of the King James Bible while being more accurate. To read that and then Robinson’s careful analysis is to have one’s understanding of the text profoundly enriched and changed.
• Richard Harries is a former bishop of Oxford and the author of Haunted by Christ: Modern Writers and the Struggle for Faith. Reading Genesis by Marilynne Robinson is published by Virago (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
