Making the Old Testament new again
The esteemed novelist and essayist offers an ambitious but narrow bid to rekindle religion as a source of grounding in the 21st century
The late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was an out, loud, and proud atheist, disavowing the notion of a divine puppet-master. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” he opined. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.” But for the Calvinist author Marilynne Robinson, the Big Bang is evidence of God, spun from His fingertips, as she argues in her spirited, erudite, if blinkered “Reading Genesis,” a study of the first book in both Hebrew and Christian scriptures.
Robinson kicks off with a declaration of intent: to restore religion to the center of our cosmos and common humanity. Faith, she posits, must rekindle our stunted 21stcentury lives: “It is striking how the scale of thought has contracted with the loss of serious theology.” Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “Gilead,” Robinson considers the weighty issues in clear-eyed prose; her close readings compel us to imagine these characters anew (and I say that as a former Baptist from Tennessee, who, as a child,
pored over Genesis on dozens of occasions).
She beautifully stages the provocations of Noah, Sarah, and the mesmerizing, flawed Jacob, enhancing their dramas and her lodestar theme: God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants. She shines a beam onto the book’s devices, from subtle parallelisms to incantatory language to a sure-footed realism, with only hints of magic, such as the fate of Lot’s wife. Where some critics see folklore, she sees technique, one
that has molded her career. (As she notes elsewhere, “realism has been so predominant a style among American writers for so many generations that it is easy to forget it is a style.”)
She highlights the foibles of patriarchs and matriarchs alike, a family romance that out-Freuds Freud. Rivalries between brothers — Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob — find a counterbalance in competition among sisters, Leah and Rachel, and mistress and concubine, Sarah and Hagar. Robinson teases out the scene in which Jacob wrestles the angel: the Hebrew noun translates as man rather than angel or messenger. The ambiguity of meaning speaks to the masks we use to cloak our authentic selves. “The distinction between God and the angel is blurred,” she writes. “There is also the figure of a man whom Jacob and the text understand as God. That these identities can be so fluid is significant.”
The selling of Joseph into Egyptian bondage is an artful essay unto itself, gleaming like a Fabergé egg amid cerebral analysis: “The Midianites have Joseph, the Ishmaelites have the shekels, and Joseph’s brothers have nothing but the coat that is the sign of their father’s love for him and the miserable scheme they devised in the first place to conceal his murder.” Rebekah, Isaac’s spouse and a simmering pottage of resentments, pops from the page, “a very distinctive voice,” although the inferred biography of an unhappily married woman — akin to a protagonist in Robinson’s fiction — smacks of presentism.
Hence her Achilles heel. Time and again Robinson’s metaphysics intrudes, twisting tales into motifs for the here and now, or (worse) proselytizing for her beliefs. She’s incisive when she’s interpreting tropes such as the struggle for a father’s blessing and the capriciousness of God; the Bible as literature may be her true subject. For her, though, Genesis is more, a skeleton key that unlocks divine mystery; any textual lacuna or skip of the needle she files under “providence” and “sacred history.” The will of God, she observes, “is so strong and steadfast that it can allow space within providence for people to be who they are.”
In the name of theology she jumps from Job to Psalms to the Pauline Epistles, leaving a muddle — why not just stick to the original stories themselves? Robinson is letting theology lead Genesis by the nose and not the other way around. The mapping of the human genome, for instance, confirms our DNA is virtually identical to those of other primates — we also share metabolic pathways with yeast and lab worms — yet she waves away evolutionary biology, the fossil record, even the scientific method. “Modern anthropology has tended to build upward or outward or downward from reductionist definitions, humankind as naked ape, as phenotype of the selfish gene,” she opines, alluding to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ slim, seminal 1976 volume. “Biblical anthropology begins with an exalted conception of humanity, then ponders our errors and deficiencies and our capacities for grace and truth.”
These sentences reflect a curious disdain — fear? — of any intellectual threat, whether it’s Hawking or Darwin: “Human beings are at the center of it all. Love and grief are, in this infinite Creation, things of the kind we share with God. The fact that they have their being in the deepest reaches of our extensionless and undiscoverable souls only makes them more astonishing, over against the roaring cosmos.”
Our species is the measure of all things, in Robinson’s telling. Fair enough, but why limit the wisdom and pleasures of Genesis to a Judeo-Christian (especially Protestant) audience, the alleged covenant people? Are Buddhists and Muslims permitted to savor its adventurous storytelling if they reject Robinson’s dogma? Why pull up the literary drawbridge? “Reading Genesis” is an alluring, contemplative work, yet it raises disquieting questions about religious chauvinism in an age of strife — too many questions. Perhaps Robinson could interrogate her faith, the cons as well as pros, in another book.