Book review: “Reading Genesis” by Marilynne Robinson

Throughout Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson examines the nature of God’s forgiveness and its contrast with the tendency of humans to demand vengeance or justice.

The case of Cain arises several times. I use the word “case” purposefully. Here is the world’s first murderer, having killed his brother Abel after planning the murder. Here is the world’s first murder case.

Cain is told by God, Robinson notes, that “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.” But God does not, in revenge, in justice, take Cain’s life.

She writes that, while teaching a class on Genesis, one of the students asked, “What kind of God would not kill a man who killed his brother?”

It is an excellent question, she writes, and continues that God’s action in this episode has something to say about “the whole of Scripture.”

The mark that God gives Cain to protect him from possible avengers is often read as something meant to stigmatize him as a killer, though the text very clearly says otherwise. When he says he fears he will be killed, the Lord says, “ ‘Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’ And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.”

And she adds:

For all we know, it could have made him disarmingly beautiful.

 

What Genesis actually says

Robinson’s “disarmingly beautiful” comment is an example of how, in her reading of this first book of the Hebrew Bible, what Christians call the Old Testament, she is not a prisoner of the routine understandings of the text.

She is closely studying the words and the stories and is open to their open-endedness, listens to their silences and follows the paths they point out. And she pays attention to what they actually say.

Cain as the first murderer — the knee-jerk human reaction down the millenniums has been that the “mark” must be something negative, like Hawthorne’s scarlet letter, something that identifies Cain as evil.  Racists have used this idea to brand Black people as the tainted children of Cain.

Robinson mentions this unbiblical idea of the “mark” as a stigma that’s hereditary and writes:

But Cain goes on to have a wife and son and found a city. He seems to have had the full satisfaction of a patriarchal life. His descendants credited with “fathering” many of the arts and skills of civilization. It might suggest another instance of fatherly devotion that he names the city for his son Enoch.

 

A wrathful humanity

In fact, that son, the Bible tells us, “walked with God” through a long life, and, at the end of his life, he did not die but, like Elijah, was taken up into heaven.

God gave Cain particularly estimable descendants, which would seem to discourage the notion of a hereditary curse.

But this famous tale is a study in the fact that people see what they want to see, even in Holy Scripture, whose presumed authority should encourage careful reading.

And these interpretations escape the study or the pulpit and merge with wild strains of feeling on the subject, giving the appearance of biblical authority to the primitive urge to avenge, in the course of imputing primitivity to “the God of the Old Testament.”

These interpretations, unrooted in the actual text of the Hebrew Bible, picture a God who is vengeful, wrathful, angry and vindictive. It is humanity, however, who is vengeful, wrathful, angry and vindictive.

As Robinson shows over and over throughout Reading Genesis, God is, at heart, a forgiving God. Over and over, God gives humanity a second chance. And a third chance. And on and on.

 

Companionship

Much has been made of the parallels in Genesis with the origin stories of other belief systems in the Middle East. While acknowledging those parallels, Robinson stresses what makes the Hebrew story different.

Those other origin stories are about the actions of gods, not humans. Humans, in those stories, exist to serve the gods.  By contrast, Robinson writes:

The God of Genesis is unique in His having not a use but instead a mysterious, benign intention for them.

For unknown, unfathomable reasons, God likes to be with humans, to accompany humans. Robinson calls God’s relationship with humans a “very immediate and radically asymmetrical companionship.”

Indeed, God fashioned the world for the delight of people. She writes:

This world is suited to human enjoyment — “out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight” — in anticipation of human pleasure, which the Lord presumably shares. This is an extremely elegant detail. The beauty of the trees is noted before the fact that they yield food.

Robinson asserts that this detail about trees show how radically different the God of Genesis is from those gods of Babylonian myth. Those self-centered beings, “are not the kind to let us know that our pleasure has been anticipated in the act of Creation. In this deep sense we are made to be companions with God.”

She writes that humans “are disastrously erring and rebellious, and irreducibly sacred. And God is mindful of us.”

“At the center of it all”

While relating the story of Jacob supplanting his twin Esau for Isaac’s blessing, Robinson steps back:

The narrative of Scripture has moved with astonishing speed from “Let there be light” to this intimate scene of shared grief and haplessness.  There is no incongruity in this. 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.

That they exist at all can only be proof of a tender solicitude.

God’s tender solicitude — despite the limitations and blindnesses and willfulness of human beings.  Robinson writes:

[The Hebrew Bible is] the singular history of a chosen people, one not primarily meant to offer examples of virtue or heroism or to support generalizations about ethical conduct but meant instead to trace the workings of God’s loyalty to humankind through disgrace and failure and even crime.

Again, my old rabbis practice a generous rigor in not having obscured this essential meaning by editing or eliding the tales on which it depends. They have preserved the world’s best hope.

The Hebrew Bible isn’t a story of heroes. Neither is it hagiography, nor uplifting tales of morally pure actors.

It is about humans with all their flaws, and those rabbis, the ones who pulled together the old stories into Genesis and the rest of the Old Testament, leave in the darkest of stories.  The Hebrew Bible is the story of God. And it is the story of humans.

 

Interested in human beings

As her book comes near its end, Robinson writes that Genesis is framed by two stories of forgiveness — God forgiving Cain, and Joseph forgiving his ten brothers. Cain fathered “the saintly Enoch and [was] the ancestor of Noah, from whom all humankind is descended.” Cain is a vehicle of God’s providence, despite his crime.

At every turn, even with the Flood, God limits punishment or doesn’t punish at all.

Grace tempers judgment. In this way the text conceptualizes the justice of God together with His mercy or grace or His loyalty to Creation…As in the matter of Cain, the tacit withholding of expected punishment may be the primary point of these stories…

But a given of the text is that God is interested in human beings. If they are to be granted individuality, agency, freedom, meaningful existence as human beings, then God must practice almost limitless restraint.

 

“Align oneself with the will of God?”

And how to make moral sense of this in our own lives?

Justice or kindness, vengeance or grace, the hard edge of the letter of the law or forgiveness? Robinson writes:

Our punitive bias, the legitimation of vengeance, in many cases the sanctification of it, which never means respect for the fact that God has claimed it for Himself, very much complicates the issue.

We, as humans, want to lean to an eye for an eye, to shed blood for blood shed. But Robinson has a suggestion:

If one wishes to align oneself with the will of God, granting every difficulty, grace, kindness is the safer choice.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.14.25