A writer’s book, not a scholar’s; it has no footnotes. Its power lies in the particular reading it gives us of one of the world’s foundational texts ... There are some arguable points. Robinson’s depiction of law as a framework of instruction that is up to us to keep or break is extremely modern and individualistic, and doesn’t square with the enforced tribal behavior of the Mosaic code ... These are the idiosyncratic incidentals of a genuinely idiosyncratic reading. Against them, there is the tough-minded continual splendor of Robinson’s attention to Genesis’ figures in the landscape.
Complete with narrative arc and flawed characters who are ever worthy of redemption ... The author counters a literal, religionized view of the chapter. Never forceful or pedantic, she leads readers to draw conclusions of their own, as she points to truths beyond the events depicted.
This is the stuff of sermons—the kind I’d willingly sit through. But Robinson is also up to something that should interest her secular readers. She’s working out a poetics. In her deft hands, Genesis becomes a precursor to the novel—the domestic novel, as it happens, which is the kind she writes. Perhaps I’m making her sound self-glorifying. She’s not ... The genius of Reading Genesis lies in its collapse of the space between the holy and the mundane, the metaphysical and the physical.
On the face of it, Robinson should be an ideal reader of Genesis ... One wants a novelist of Robinson’s talent to cast her eye over these crooked tales, these stories bent into their shapes by human want and willfulness ... At the same time, a novelist who appears to trust in divine intervention the way you or I might trust in a train timetable, who reads these verses as human episodes written by humans who were themselves authored by God, makes for an intriguingly pious commentator ... Reading Genesis from inside rather than outside these theological presumptions seems an interesting experiment: it would involve properly crediting both the humanity and the divinity of these strange tales. At her best, Robinson is masterly at this hybrid task ... Robinson often makes an eloquent case for the specialness of this new kind of God and the unusual interest, solicitude, and high-handed love he displays to his creations. But perils attend her kind of piety. You soon become aware of Robinson skewing everything in favor of this strange God ... But at some point the shadow text extends its ghostly hand, and you realize that Robinson is not merely paraphrasing the text’s sacred premises; she is sermonizing about an actual God and his actual Providence. She is not only speaking of God but for God.
Her take on the ultimate sacred text in her tradition, the origin of it all, is fervent and expansive yet also remarkably unyielding, even dogmatic ... There is a lot to grapple with here. A resistant reader might balk at the coercive quality of 'This being true,' which asserts rather than persuades ... There’s a smoothness and elegance in Robinson’s view of biblical narrative, if perhaps also a slightly claustrophobic quality ... Perhaps it makes sense that some of my favorite parts of the book are the rare occasions when the Sunday school voice slips a little.
To seasoned readers of Robinson, this will come as no surprise; she has never written for anyone’s approval. Her work is not so much out of fashion as devoid of its possibility ... Robinson’s astonishment pervades the book. It’s infectious. The style is lyrical and leisurely as ever; it is clear that this text is her native soil.
Promises a literary close read in addition to the theological one ... Not without its pleasures. I enjoyed Robinson’s analysis of narrative techniques, etymology and how translation has affected interpretation. But a beach read, it is not. Her nonfiction is denser and more dogmatic than her fiction: I missed John Ames’s gentle self-questioning. Without the empathy and elegance of the novels, for this lay reader, it felt like sitting on a hard wood pew in itchy Sunday best.
Robinson’s reading is full of telling details and keenly observed parallels ... 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.
Boiling down Reading Genesis to intertextual and grammatical awareness or theological box-checking misses what is distinctive about this deep and sagacious work ... Robinson takes for granted that the reader knows these stories. She rarely offers the gist of a passage before diving deep into theological and literary waters. Those who’ve never waded into the tales of Noah, Abraham, Sarah, and others may well find themselves frustrated.
She reads scripture as sensitively as she has shaped her novels, and, as a Calvinist, she brings a coherent theology to bear. But I suspect that her main preparation for this project was in the pulpit. The proper work of preaching and religious teaching, to my mind, is simply love, Robinson’s great topic in the novels—not romantic love but the helpless needs and attachments of the family. She bolsters the old hope that, when women get more power and more audible voices, these will be constructive and moderate on this instinctive basis ... The divinity who needed explaining was the single, remote, unembodied, all-powerful, just but loving and protective God of the Hebrews. In this connection, Robinson naturally takes up theodicy, or the problem of reconciling such a God with the existence of evil in his creation ... For me, merely contemplating such contradictions is inspiring, as if violent and greedy humankind is not going to wear out nature’s patience or reach other logical limits within this generation. One glory of good scriptural and theological exegesis (as C.S. Lewis found out) is that those who are neither converts nor candidates for conversion may welcome it; it is literature. The book has definite faults. Robinson brushes off important matters of textual and contextual history; she shows very little interest in Classical Hebrew, or in Judaism of any age. The propensity to “assume” what she wants to be so feeds into her most disturbing tendency, which is to jump forward to Christianity, as if that religion were something the Hebrew Bible inherently prepared for or led to—or even were subordinate to or replaced by, a belief called supersessionism. No hint of this would be needed for Robinson to work her wonders.
Takes us to another level altogether. She insists that we read the book as a genuine composition, not an awkward patchwork ... It is very much a novelist’s approach, and all the better for it; the result is a brilliantly fresh reading of familiar stories ... It invites us to take time in reading the stories again, in the company of an exceptionally wise and perceptive storyteller.
Marilynne Robinson always been a theologian at heart...It just so happens that Robinson’s theology has taken shape in essays, novels, and prose so patient and unpatronizing that it’s embarrassing how long one sometimes takes to catch the point ... To seasoned readers of Robinson, this will come as no surprise; she has never written for anyone’s approval. Her work is not so much out of fashion as devoid of its possibility. Robinson is fashionless ... Robinson’s astonishment pervades the book. It’s infectious. The style is lyrical and leisurely as ever; it is clear that this text is her native soil. Readers unfamiliar with Genesis will see how deeply her novels are suffused with its spirit and major themes ... In Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Marilynne Robinson sees the momentous beginning of divine grace in human history. From them, it radiates outward and onward, down through the centuries; through their story, we may learn from and even imitate this incomparable godlikeness. For this reason, she can say, or rather confess, that in maintaining and handing on the book of Genesis, the Jewish people 'have preserved the world’s best hope.'
n luminous prose she challenges a modern reader to understand just how unusual a book Genesis is, pregnant with meaning that stretches to our own day ... Robinson deftly guides the reader through Genesis’s account ... Robinson has masterfully traced that sense of wonder back to its ancient, remarkable source.
