Marilynne Robinson goes deep on Genesis

Who doesn’t love Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead—or even more, her first novel, Housekeeping? Yet better than her fiction, for my tastes, are her brilliant essays, which reveal that she should be ranked among our wisest theologians. Now she offers us Reading Genesis.

It’s not a commentary. Not one chapter division is indicated. It is, rather, a single essay of 230 pages. Robinson warns that the habit of reading the Bible piecemeal for a sermon or scholarly argument overlooks the text’s larger structures and strategies. She detects that “in Genesis the recurring sin is grievous harm to one’s brother. Cain casts a long shadow.” Indeed, “Genesis is framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, of Cain by the Lord, and of his ten brothers by Joseph.”

Through this understanding, Robinson is able to divine inner moods not verbalized in the text. How did Jacob live with those ten sons? He never asked if they had done away with Joseph, leaving unspoken “a question too terrible to be asked, a confession too terrible to be made, and Jacob growing old in this silence.” Amid this silence, did Jacob shiver as he recalled being a horribly flawed sibling to Esau? “Since the presumed death of Joseph,” Robinson writes, the grieving Jacob