READING GENESIS
The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil. This being true, it must take account of things as they are. It must acknowledge in a meaningful way the darkest aspects of the reality we experience, and it must reconcile them with the goodness of God and of Being itself against which this darkness stands out so sharply. This is to say that the Bible is a work of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology is based. I will suggest that in the early chapters of Genesis God’s perfect Creation passes through a series of changes, declensions that permit the anomaly of a flawed and alienated creature at the center of it all, ourselves, still sacred, still beloved of God. To say that the narrative takes us through these declensions—the Fall and the loss of Eden, then the Flood and the laws that allow the killing of animals and of homicides, then the disruption of human unity at Babel—is not to say that they happened or that they didn’t happen, but that their sequence is an articulation of a complex statement about reality. The magnificent account of the onset of Being and the creation by God of His image in humankind is undiminished in all that follows despite the movement away from the world of God’s first intention—modified as this statement must be by the faith that He has a greater, embracing intention that cannot fail. Within the final mystery of God’s purpose there are the parables of prophets and sages. History and experience are themselves parables awaiting their prophets.
However it came about, this narrative sequence establishes a profound and essential assertion of the sacred good, making pangs and toil a secondary reality, likewise the punitive taking of life. This construction of reality, absolute good overlaid but never diminished or changed by temporal accommodations to human nature, allows for faithfulness to this higher good. Grace modifies law. Law cannot limit grace.
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I will speak of “the writers” of the books of Moses because these texts appear to me to have been the product of reflection and refinement that took place over the course of generations or centuries. This is not a version of the so-called documentary hypothesis, which claims to find in them separate, identifiable sources, documents that can be attributed to writers of particular regions or factions and which are so little reconciled or assimilated to one another that there are, in effect, sutures in the text, inconsistencies in such non-trivial matters as the nature of God. I know that the suggestion of human authorship can seem to some like a denial of the unique sacredness of the Bible. But the Bible itself names human authors for most of its books, meaning no more perhaps than that a collection of writings shared an affinity for the thought of a particular teacher or school. In other words, whether or not these attributions reflect authorship as we understand it, the Bible itself indicates no anxiety about association with human minds, words, lives, and passions. This is a notable instance of our having a lower opinion of ourselves than the Bible justifies.
I take it that in the course of their development the Scriptures were pondered very deeply by those who composed and emended them, and that this created a profound coherency, stabilizing difficult concepts or teachings to the point that earlier and later passages can be seen as elucidating one another. I imagine a circle of the pious learned, rabbis before the word, remembering together what their grandmothers had told them, finding the loveliness of old memory in an odd turn of phrase, realizing together that these strange tales sustained a sense of the presence of God that was richly renewed for them in their reverent deliberations. This is how religions live in the world. I take it that, in a wholly exceptional degree, their deliberations found their way to truth.
For us moderns there is a kind of safety in finding a taint of factionalism or self-interest in anything human beings have done. The hermeneutics of suspicion arose early in nineteenth-century readings of these very texts. If they were in fact patched together from various “documents” whose writers can be deduced from their language and emphasis, and whose purposes were not theological after all but instead political or factional, then thousands of years of credulity have been embarrassed by a flood of journal articles.
No one wants to be found among the credulous. Belief itself exists in disturbing proximity to credulity, a fact that has afflicted the church with a species of tepid anguish for generations. I am proposing here that there is a hermeneutics of self-protectiveness that has disabled interpretation and that has generalized into an abandonment of metaphysics as a legitimate mode of thought. Does it make any sense that if the suppositious band of document writers known to scholars as E, J, P, and D with all their supernumeraries were not thinking theologically, therefore metaphysics itself is foreclosed? This is like saying that if the moon landing was actually filmed in Arizona there is no universe. It is striking how the scale of thought has contracted with the loss of serious theology. A contemporary Kant or Hegel would find little purchase in the vocabulary of thought allowed to us now. In any case, biblical texts in general may seem to exist under the shadow of a demystification that happens not to have touched them yet. But they are really far too tough-minded to be the products of ordinary this-worldly calculation. This quality of mind is carried forward through the whole of the Bible.
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Collective decisions having to do with the language of creeds, the accuracy of translations, and so on have been accepted as highly authoritative from the early history of Christianity. The canons of the Hebrew and the Christian Bibles were determined by councils. The writings of major theologians can be virtually deuterocanonical, even or especially when it is forgotten that a doctrine has a history and an origin. I assume that the reflection on Scripture by its compositors was theological in nature, governed by beliefs of overriding importance, first of all that God is one. Crucially, the literature could only have been dependent on deep faith that the community that created, studied, and revered it did so in service to an extraordinary calling, to embed in language a knowledge of God. I assume that the text as a whole developed with a full awareness of the text as it existed to that point and of the traditions, thoughts, and events that might be assimilable to it. Scripture grew from this basis for centuries, continuously reflecting on itself, seeing ongoing history as meaningful or revelatory just as the lives of the patriarchs and the great exodus had been.
According to Scripture, a pastoralist clan with a shared ancestor, Abraham, were enslaved for centuries in Egypt, then migrated under the leadership of a figure named Moses to the land of Canaan. There, over time, they became a society, a nation. The unifying belief that made one people of this federation of tribes was that they were a special case in God’s dealings with humankind, first of all in their having a knowledge of God that arose from a relationship with Him, initiated by Him. He had made a covenant that assured His loyalty to them through His bond with their ancestors. When God identifies Himself to Moses as “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” He is invoking a very remote past, four hundred years distant from the generation of the exodus. There seems to have been no continuity of covenant patriarchy to be invoked in the intervening period, no way of life of the people within Egypt to be preserved after their migration, though there were elements of social order among them, tribes and elders. A memory of the God of Abraham must survive among them, since Moses asks God for a name the people will recognize and he is given YHWH, a name which modern scholars spell and pronounce Yahweh. (In Genesis 4:26, during the time of Cain, it is said that men began to call on this name.) It is noted in the text that the mother and father of Moses and his brother Aaron are of the priestly tribe of the Levites. Their mother has a theophoric name, Jochebed. And Moses carries the bones of Joseph to Canaan, faithful to his last wish. Only these details suggest a continuity with the faith and culture of the patriarchs.
Then where do the stories of the patriarchs come from? I take the narratives of Genesis to have been collected at the time of the exodus and after, when the fact that this liberated multitude was participating in a history and an identity associated with these names would have prompted a great interest in old stories about them. If Moses was adopted by an Egyptian princess, he would probably have remained with his wet-nurse mother for a number of years, until he was a sturdy child, at least. So his mother could have filled his mind with Hebrew lore, visions of the old freedom, before his acculturation as an Egyptian had begun. On the other hand, he is taken to be an Egyptian, even by other Hebrews. Moses and Aaron are both Egyptian names, and no Hebrew names are remembered for them. Moses only began to identify with his people as a grown man, and then in a sudden impulse that alienated him from them. After he realized that their God had spoken to him, invoking these ancient names, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he might have listened with great interest to every story about the tribes of Israel in the generations before their descent into Egypt. It should be noted that, by comparison with the hero stories that are taken to anchor the identities of other ancient cultures, these tales of the patriarchs are notably human in scale, gentle, even domestic. In any case, these stories are the nucleus of a powerful literature and a powerful identity.
All this assumes that Moses himself is a historical figure. There are so many great lawgivers in antiquity, so many creators and heroes of nations, that doubt in his case seems tendentious. Dido, Queen of Carthage, was an actual woman, the outcast sister of an actual Pygmalion. Because the historical consequences of Moses’s life have been and continue to be immeasurably great, it is easy to forget that, measured by the standards of a Cyrus or a Tamerlane or an Alexander, he is a very minor figure. In terms of lives taken, countries subjugated, or wealth amassed, his impact was extremely modest and entirely credible. I will assume that Moses, he to whom the Lord spoke face-to-face, and his tradition are primary influences on the composition of Genesis.
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It has been usual for a century and a half for writers on the Old Testament to compare the biblical narratives of Creation with the myths of the surrounding cultures. Similarities among them are generally taken to indicate borrowing, and the borrowing to be proof that the biblical texts are derivative, the early chapters of Genesis, as the younger literature, being derived from these pagan tales. I will look at the ways in which the texts are comparable, and the ways in which these points of comparison establish profound differences in the conceptions of the very systems of Being articulated by these narratives.
The fact that Western thought has been deeply influenced by concepts like creation ex nihilo and the Fall of Man makes clear that the Genesis narratives serve very ably as troves of conceptual language. Large assertions are made in the text, for example, that the reality we experience had a beginning, an idea disputed by major scientists into the twentieth century. An emergent universe brings innumerable mysteries, scientific as well as theological—Why did it happen? How will it end?—which the ancients both anticipated and variously addressed in language that is figurative and therefore charged with meaning.
Babylonia was a great cultural influence in its region and period. Because they are most often discussed by scholars in relation to Genesis, and because, in the literatures of the ancient Near East, they are most comparable with it, I will restrict my comparison of biblical and pagan literature to these two great Babylonian narratives, the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish, variants of which appear throughout the region. Other cities adopted them as their own, changing little more than the names of the heroes and gods involved. The Genesis stories, rather than adopting or appropriating them, instead engage the literatures to which they are often compared, accepting an image or a term but transforming its meaning within a shared language of thought. Of course we have no knowledge of the preliterate life of these narratives or of their ultimate origins.
The Enuma Elish is actually a theogony, a tale of the emergence of the gods and the rise of one god, Marduk, as dominant among them. An attempt is made to describe Marduk:
His limbs were ingeniously made, beyond comprehension,
Impossible to understand, too difficult to perceive.
Four were his eyes, four were his ears;
When his lips moved, fire blazed forth.
The four ears were enormous
And likewise the eyes; they perceived everything.
The gods of the Enuma Elish suffer hunger, terror, and loss of sleep. There are generations of them, born of one another, the great mother of them all being Tiamat, a serpent monster, who, provoked by the noise the younger gods make, determines to kill them. She is so terrifying that the young god Marduk alone is able to defeat her. He splits her corpse like a fish, uses half to make the sky, the other half the earth, makes her two weeping eyes into the Tigris and the Euphrates, and so on. This could hardly be more remote from the infinite serenity of “let there be … and there was.”
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Against this background of ambient myth, to say that God is the good creator of a good creation is not a trivial statement. The insistence of Genesis on this point, even the mention of goodness as an attribute of the Creation, is unique to Genesis. A Babylonian, drawing on the account of things made in the narratives of his or her religion and, for that matter, on his or her experience as a human being, might beg to differ. Their gods are fickle, engrossed in conflicts and resentments, indifferent or hostile to humankind. To the degree that the epic of a culture influences its people’s experience of the world, a cup of water might taste of the tears of a vast serpent forever alive in death. It is not difficult to imagine how the rigors of ancient life might have yielded this alarming view of things. It can smack of realism down to the present day. Yet Babylonia was also like ancient Greece in that it was civil and humane by the standards of the time. Its laws were literally exemplary, quite probably a direct influence on the law of Moses.
Where did the relative benignity of the Hebrew cosmos come from? It certainly does not depend on a denial of the reality of evil, understanding the word to embrace such things as loss or harm as well as transgression or malice. Indeed, it seems to come with the recognition of evil. The Fall and its consequences, Cain’s killing of his brother, the Flood—these events are the foreground of biblical history. If Genesis should be attributed to the influence of Moses, it was written after the centuries of slavery in Egypt and then the desert wandering, two periods of extreme suffering, which were followed by the barbarous turmoil described in the books of Joshua and Judges. In any case, to assert the existence of evil in the broad sense, as it is understood in the primordial stories, Genesis 2:4 to 11:32, is essential to the whole narrative of Scripture. The Babylonian epic describes wars between rival armies of gods. For them “good” seems to be the order that comes with the triumph of Marduk. In Genesis, from the first, good is intrinsic to the whole of Creation. So in this very important respect the literatures are conceptually unlike. The Hebrew writers were not simply appropriating prevailing myths. They had weighty, human-centered concerns of their own, concerns entirely unique to them.
There is no reason to suppose that, over the medium term, any ancient people would have been exempt from the afflictions brought on by the vagaries of nature, not to mention by human greed or violence. Given the importance of evil in experience, the Hebrews were set a remarkable problem by their monotheism, their one just and loving God. Evil could not be understood as an aspect of God’s nature or laid to a consort or a rival god. There was no serpent monster Tiamat to unleash a deluge for reasons of her own. In this essential regard, to assign causes to events is clearly not the method or intention of biblical narrative. We don’t know why Abel’s offering was acceptable and Cain’s was not, why Jacob was favored over Esau or Israel over the nations. Events have their origins and meaning within God’s truly inscrutable intention. The suffering of the people is foreseen when childless Abraham, faultless and favored, is given a vision of futurity in the form of a terrible dream. Causality is changed, more or less disabled, when events are predestined.
This reticence can be considered a positive statement about emergent history within the emergence of reality itself. Humankind has seized upon unnumbered accounts of the character of classes, genders, and ethnicities, their probable actions, gifts, and pathologies, many of these biases having the status and the consequences of plain certainty. Behind every prejudice there is an assumption about the behavior that might or might not be expected of an individual or a population. These assumptions are frequently codified as restrictions that preclude challenges to their predictive force. This is only one instance of an obdurate confidence that afflicts us generally, the idea that we know the causes of things. It is the basis from which we reason backward to arrive at explanation. Why do human beings exist? To make offerings to Marduk and the gods. Why do human beings exist? The God of Genesis is unique in His having not a use but instead a mysterious, benign intention for them.
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Abraham was, at the time of “an horror of great darkness” and a terrible dream, a wanderer with no heir and no country and no certain place to bury his dead. He did have the singular attention of God, who confronted him again and again with promises, blessings with the force of demands. There is nothing conditional about them, though Abraham’s “belief” makes him suitable to receive them. He leaves his father’s house and, with his family, goes to a distant country the Lord has promised him and his descendants, and where he cannot stay because there is famine. To an observer his life might look like the life of any pastoralist, this stranger drifting through the countryside, looking for grazing for his herds. By epic standards there is a very great quiet around the dealings of God with Abraham. Though Abraham is engrossed inwardly in an awareness of God that will indeed make him the father of nations, and though God’s intense awareness of Abraham is essential to all that follows, the surface of the commonplace is broken only a few times in the course of this very immediate and radically asymmetrical companionship— as good a word as any, since the Lord, as a stranger, has accepted, no doubt enjoyed, Abraham’s hospitality. They have broken bread together. It might be true that Abraham’s conception of God is limited by his having lived in a world of multitudes of gods with special and limited powers—nature, tribal, and household gods. But the conception of God in the text, in the telling, understands Him as the God of history. By means of landless and childless Abram, his name until God renames him Abraham, “a father of many nations,” He will bless all the families of the earth. It should be noted that this is a very sweet promise, a credit to Him Who makes it and him who is moved by it. I know of nothing in any way comparable. The very great tact with which God enters the human world through Abraham, respecting its expectations, is entirely consistent with the centrality He has given humankind in His Creation.
As an interpretation of his people’s history cast back on patriarchal times, Abram’s dream vision makes authoritative an understanding of the slavery and wandering of the Hebrew tribes as divinely intended and providential. The darkness of the dream and the weirdness of its occasion make clear that grief and cruelty are foretold in it. No reason for them is given. On its face the bondage in Egypt is neither a reward nor a punishment. It is a long moment in providential history, not to be explained in other terms. In any case, the blackness of darkness is never minimized. Over time, the biblical narrative inverts the apparent meaning of the suffering of many generations, no slight thing. Grueling misfortune prepares for singular favor, difficult favor, whose main product and proof might be the narratives that record and interpret this history. The narrative introduces the idea of divine purpose, relative to humankind, its intention to be realized over vast stretches of time. This is an understanding of God and humanity that has no equivalent in other literatures, God both above and within time, His providence reaching across unnumbered generations. The character of everything, good fortune and bad, is changed when its ultimate meaning awaits the great unfolding of His intention. So the problem of evil is not solved but is instead infinitely complicated. When Jesus says of his executioners “They know not what they do,” we can appreciate how very radically his words understate the case. If the same were said of the mythic progenitors of human history, Adam and Eve, or of the splitters of the atom, the creators of antibiotics, and all the rest of us, the truth of these words would overwhelm our power to conceive.
Copyright © 2024 by Marilynne Robinson
