Trivialised to Death

The first time​ the man heard God, he uprooted his entire life, though he was very old. Then God appeared to him in person, an event which would embarrass later thinkers. God made the man an impossible promise in the shape of a son. His wife was ninety, and she laughed. When the child arrived, it was hardly unreasonable to think it a miracle. They named the child after the laughter.

Then, when the child was older, God told the man to kill the boy as a sacrifice. God permitted no ambiguity about what he wanted. The man did not argue, as he had on another occasion when God proposed to destroy an entire city. A silence descended on him. He rose and walked three days to the place of sacrifice, his son carrying wood for an immolation but no sacrificial lamb. The absence of a lamb must have seemed ominous to the servants, who remained at the foot of the mountain. Only the son dared break the silence, asking what it was they were to sacrifice. As they climbed, the man answered his question ambiguously. God, he said, will see to it. His phrase might be interpreted to mean ‘provide’, but also ‘observe’. It wasn’t a reassuring response. He built the pyre, bound his son’s limbs and raised the knife. But an angel intervened, the boy was spared, and a providential ram tangled in a thicket was offered in his place. Twice in the telling of this story it is said that ‘the two of them walked on together,’ father and son. You might expect a third use of the phrase, offering resolution after the descent from the mountain, but the writer withholds this satisfaction. Only careful readers have detected filial sourness under the paternal relief. In fact, we do not ever hear again of the son speaking to his father.

Kant thought this story obscene: any theophany which commands so fundamental an ethical transgression as child murder cannot be considered divine; still less can obedience to it be celebrated as exemplary piety. This was his pretext for arguing that moral reason must never submit to authority, even when that authority seems to speak with the voice of God. It wasn’t just a theological matter. Isaac’s binding by his obscene and irrational father, Abraham, could be taken as an analogy for the state of self-imposed tutelage Kant wanted society to escape. Prudently, the Prussian royal censor banned him from writing about religion again.

Kant wasn’t the first to find the story troubling. Commentators looked for ambiguity in God’s command – did he really mean the boy should be killed? – or claimed that Abraham’s prophetic skill had delivered him from any real doubt about the outcome. Such readings merely prove that the story’s power depends on its obscenity, on Abraham’s foreboding and uncertainty, and our reluctance to look directly at its darkness. The Akedah, as it is called in Hebrew, has a vast reception history, though this is only one small aspect of the cultural legacy of the Book of Genesis. A subversive strand of Jewish commentary wonders if Abraham passed the test of piety but failed the test of paternal love. Caravaggio’s Isaac howls with his face pressed to the altar. Erich Auerbach gave the story’s elliptical silence, ‘fraught with background’, a fundamental place in the genealogy of Western literature. The greatest modern response – an antithesis to Kant – was Kierkegaard’s, for whom the ethically impossible demand became the terrible, paradoxical predicate of faith. In Fear and Trembling he wondered how many had truly understood the story. ‘How many did it make sleepless?’ The pseudonym Kierkegaard used seems in sympathy with the story’s starkness: Johannes de Silentio.

Genesis is a collection of ancient Hebrew stories, which moves from universal primordial history to the lives of a single family, undistinguished, quarrelsome and violent, through whose history the transcendent deity makes himself known. It yokes together tribal stories, reworkings of local myths, genealogical tradition and popular aetiologies. Aetiology explains the origin of a custom, name or phenomenon, and its sign points both ways: Babel ‘explains’ the multiplicity of tongues, but every subjective experience of miscommunication recalls Babel’s hubris. Genesis probably reached its current form by the fifth century BCE, though some of it is much older. It can shock readers who are familiar only with later airbrushed versions. God seems arbitrary, appears to learn and then changes his mind. (Jack Miles made this process of ‘self-discovery’ the premise of his God: A Biography.) The opposite of almost every historical detail I’ve just summarised has been argued at some point by scholars. Most modern readers are probably closest to Emily Dickinson, who carried around a vague impression of an ‘arid book’; but Dickinson was herself surprised to find ‘how infinitely wise & how merry it is’. She moved from admiring the ‘surpassing splendour & force of its speech’ towards its deeper ‘fathomless gulfs of meaning’, while envying the ‘serenity’ granted believers. Genesis, which narrates moral failure, theft, murder, rape, unremedied injustice and sorrow, is a strange place to find serenity. Its silences demand interpretation. ‘Few and evil have been the days of my life,’ Jacob declares as his wanderings come to an end.

Marilynne Robinson is interested in readers of Scripture (she always capitalises the word). It furnishes the mental world of her characters and structures their stories. Her Gilead novels are a refraction of Genesis’s interest in wayward sons, familial deceit, guilt and hope, through the double prism of American religion and politics. James Wood once praised Robinson’s style for its ‘spiritual force’, derived from spare, unspotted Protestant exemplars. In the novels, plainness is a vehicle adequate to domestic grief and spiritual epiphany alike. Robinson’s precise style is tuned to pugnacity in her essays, in which bad readers of scripture abound: right-wing fundamentalists, cringing liberals, those who traffic in cliché and caricature about God, Christ, Calvin. Assertions arrive with the force of spiritual dicta: contemporary culture, she says, is gripped by a cynicism that takes self-serving ugliness to be the reality of all social and cultural phenomena, and thereby works towards these ends.

The Gilead quartet is echt America, set in the mid-20th century, the country’s Puritan heritage fading and bus boycotts starting up in Montgomery. Faith and politics mix more readily there. Though a declared Democrat, Robinson sometimes seems an awkward fit. She has a countercultural disdain for self-congratulation. Recent interviews suggest her friendship with Obama has cooled during his Netflix-funded retirement. Another dictum: ‘It is my belief that a civilisation can trivialise itself to death.’

Reading Genesis, an extended close reading of the first book of the Bible, is the opposite of trivial. It offers profound attention to a fundamental cultural text, and illuminates Robinson’s own work. At minimum, Genesis has shaped basic claims about human purpose, obligation and behaviour for more than two millennia. In Gilead, Robinson’s dying preacher, John Ames, ruminates that we are ‘a little civilisation built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilisations’, and the explicit argument of Reading Genesis is that we fail adequately to understand this patrimony. We are diminished by this, and so is our conceptual reach. Belatedness is a frequent mood in Robinson, though complicated by her faith. Like the naive and penetrating narrator of Housekeeping, she is always on the lookout for the ‘law of completion’, ‘some general rescue’.

The decorous move would be to invoke the separation of church and state at the level of criticism: our metaphysical beliefs (or lack of them) remain private, but we agree that the stories in Genesis are significant, rewarding, important – any category other than ‘true’. For Robinson, such a separation would be dishonest and unsustainable. She laments a ‘hermeneutics of self-protectiveness’ determined to avoid credulity and responsible for a contraction in the scale of thought. She is not a dimwit literalist searching for Noah’s timbers on Ararat; rather, she believes that Genesis is a ‘complex statement about reality’ tracking a series of human moral ‘declensions’, achieved through literary art and therefore susceptible to literary thought and analysis. Literary reading, in her view, is theological reading. Yet ‘in a wholly exceptional degree’, the literary artists of the Bible – which is distinct from all other human art – ‘found their way to truth’. In line with her Calvinism, Robinson finds in Genesis evidence of God’s goodness, his interest in human beings, a providential pattern to history and unmerited grace. Her belief that ‘events are working themselves out at another scale and towards other purposes’ entails delaying judgment and blame, though it can make human agency feel illusory. As she says, ‘providential’ is not a ‘synonym for happy or propitious’ but it can still seem like divine self-exculpation.

The Akedah, for Robinson, is not just about Abraham’s faith but about the logic of sacrifice. Child sacrifice seems to have been a latent temptation for people who believed they understood its transactional nature: the more urgent the need, the greater the sacrifice, the greater the blessing. (Actual evidence for the prevalence of child sacrifice among ancient Canaanites is hotly contested.) It is a recurrent human temptation to think about relationships in transactional terms. Genesis repeatedly worries about the way those transactions take place, when they are to be repeated, whether or not one living thing can stand as substitute or payment for another. The Akedah matters for Robinson because she sees the episode as a covert mercy only revealed in time, which had the effect of forbidding child sacrifice and instituting a substitution instead. ‘The seeming cruelty towards Abraham is compassion to those great nations who learned from him or modelled their piety on his.’ The providential consequences of an individual life, its unclear moral choices and its suffering, are so expansive and so distant that they cannot be grasped from the perspective of that individual life. The gap between them is the terrain of faith and grace.

Robinson quotes Isaiah in support of her claim that God desires justice rather than sacrifice: the entire transactional logic, not just its dark hyperbole, is wrong. She insists on unmerited grace, which is a kind of short-circuit of that logic. The rare intrusion of a later text masks an awkwardness, however. God may not be interested in sacrifice, but Genesis is. Every interaction between God and man is marked by the pouring out of blood. Genesis never quite looks this pattern of cutting and sealing in the face, but it sits deep in its cultural assumptions and even in its verbs: a covenant is made by cutting. The cruelty of the Akedah is not only ‘seeming’: it endures. Father and son do not walk on together. Twice, later in the text, Jacob swears by ‘the Terror of Isaac’. From the perspective of individual life, providence might seem cold comfort. This does not seem to ruffle Robinson.

Biblical scholarship underpins Reading Genesis, but Robinson is ambivalent about its effects. She dislikes the documentary hypothesis, though the precise object of her disdain is unclear. Philologically well-evidenced, this hypothesis suggests that the text of Genesis is a synthesis of multiple sources, each of which depicts a slightly different God, at differing levels of anthropomorphism or abstraction, each of which has a different agenda. Robinson’s objections cannot be those of the fundamentalist, since it is the literary character, intellect and skill of the text’s final redactors that she believes are obscured. In an essay in The Givenness of Things (2015), she worries that all ‘higher criticism’ reduces the God of the Bible to less than the sum of his Canaanite and Babylonian parts, a ‘pagan amalgam’.

Several ancient Mesopotamian cultures had their own stories of a great flood, a fact that Robinson says ‘electrifies both fundamentalists and religion’s cultured despisers’ (despite her wide-ranging literacy, ‘cultured’ is for her a term of contempt). She stresses the parallel between Noah’s flood and that of Utnapishtim, narrated in the Epic of Gilgamesh, precisely because they ‘differ crucially at the points of similarity’. For Mesopotamian cultures, the universe was subject to capricious, amoral, powerful but limited gods who were often in conflict and whose sole interest in humanity was as a substitute labour force which fed them through sacrifice. In one version the flood is causeless, in another it is prompted because the din of humanity interferes with divine sleep. It’s hard not to find these gods, hungry and fearful, clustering around the smoke of Utnapishtim’s sacrifice, a little pathetic. The parallels accentuate the strange intimacy and potency of Genesis’s human beings, the apex of creation, made in the image of God. The writers of Genesis are literary revolutionaries, revising the familiar materials of their culture for a new purpose.

Moral knowledge​ and capacity for choice are fundamental to Genesis. The endless antics of the gods, squabbling and subduing and flaying each other to make the world, were finally of much less interest than the exigencies of moral freedom. Genesis has little interest in the ramified, personified cosmos of other traditions. Its central predicate is human life and conduct. History, and the history of one marginal family-tribe, becomes the means through which God is known. Scholars such as Yehezkel Kaufmann insisted that this biblical monotheism was utterly discontinuous with its cultural context. Like Robinson, they protest a little too much, but the divergences are striking: Gilgamesh, horrified by death, strives to find and fails to keep a plant which grants immortality. Such elusive plants are familiar in myth. A Tree of Life sits in the background of the Eden story, but is of little interest to the Genesis writers. Everything really springs from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which has no known ancient parallel. It’s as if they were saying: this is what actually matters. Perhaps it took a marginalised, semi-nomadic, ragtag underclass, for whom a parade of divine kings meant little, to see that. ‘A wandering Aramaean was my father,’ they state in Deuteronomy.

The writers of Genesis were more creative than is generally understood, and Robinson is also slyly creative in her interpretations. Genesis tells us about two Lamechs. One descends from Cain, the original murderer. This Lamech is a violent braggart and the first polygamist: nothing is enough for him. Cain suffered punitive exile, but God, in strange and ambiguous mercy, promised to return any violence done to him sevenfold. Lamech makes this promise of protection into a pretext for rapine: he will return any injury to himself not seven but 77 times over. He is an emblem of a world sunk in retributive violence, which looks disconcertingly like our own and which so disgusts God that he determines to destroy it. The other Lamech, descended from another of Adam’s sons, Seth, is the peaceable father of Noah, through whom humanity survives.

This tiny genealogy is provocative. Multiplication and substitution operate under its surface: the first sacrifice accompanies, or begets, the first murder. Both Cain and Abel sacrifice to God, but God – for unclear reasons – favours Abel. Cain’s unmastered jealousy moves him to murder his brother. Vengeance, another kind of substitution, risks multiplying uncontrollably. It is one of many moral and social declensions in Genesis. God, whose sacrificial criteria initially seem arbitrary, suffers surprise and regret, and then changes his mind at least twice. Names in one genealogical line recur in the other. Scholars suspect this preserves two distinct traditions about the same people; Robinson uses this possibility to assert that the two Lamechs are one person.

Robinson’s move is audacious. It grants her a clearer providential story. Had Cain and Lamech not lived, Noah would not have been. Moral change, the possibility that drives Robinson’s novels, does not seem to occur to God as an alternative to wholesale destruction. Her tender reading of Cain, whom she understands as lamenting not his punishment but his guilt, allows her to see exemplary divine mercy as interrupting a story in which vengeance seems instinctive and natural. The passage is one of very few where Robinson pays direct attention to the Hebrew, where avoni (עֲוֹנִ֖י) might mean either Cain’s sin or the punishment for it. (Ibn Ezra remarks that many Hebrew words denote both an action and its consequences.) ‘The story,’ she writes, ‘was always about Cain’: neither sacrifice nor Abel really matter. Abel’s name means ‘vapour’, and a much later biblical writer would use that word to lament the vanity and insubstantiality of the world. Cain is our prototype. ‘We are disastrously erring and rebellious, and irreducibly sacred.’

Like most revisionists, Robinson has never presented herself as such. Her rescue of Calvin from the theocratic terror and psychic dread of his reputation depends on her emphasis on his humanism, something he may not himself have recognised. Her determination to find universalism in Genesis also requires reading against the grain. She avoids the antisemitism often lurking in Christian readings of the Hebrew Bible, and simply omits most questions of land and possession. Pagans are discovered to be virtuous, quite against the expectations of the patriarchs, who underestimate them. The human family is one, and the slavers who took Noah’s curse as a pretext were guilty of a misapprehension. The covenant with Abraham promises to bless ‘all the nations of the earth’ through him. The partial is a pretext for the universal. Abraham’s vision is Robinson’s scriptural leitmotif. Abraham ‘stood in the door of his tent and saw the heavens shining with their multitudes of stars, which were all the families of earth’. This image of ‘radiant futurity’, Robinson says, ‘is like nothing I know of in any other literature or myth system’, for ‘Abraham saw as God sees, valuing humankind as God does.’ Her invocation of the image is both humane and moving, seeming, in a moment of aesthetic grandeur, to reconcile providence – predestination’s ‘other name’, she admits near the end of the book – with individuality.

In a terrestrial translation of this metaphor, Gilead’s Ames stares from his window as his distracted son blows soap bubbles into the air, ‘too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavours’. Given the insistent return to the possibility of change in Robinson’s fiction, her emphasis on agency, and its celestial consequences, seems apt. The transcendent briefly meets the domestic, though almost everyone involved misses it. Ames, too, sees stars. He is moved by the ‘little incandescence’ in everyone he meets. There is great pathos in Robinson’s handling of Abraham’s vision-as-metaphor, as there is in her insistence on the rarity of laws that identify with the plight of the stranger. It might seem churlish to point out that the universality of the promise to Abraham is less clear-cut than Robinson makes it, or that it is followed by a nightmarish vision of centuries of bondage in Egypt. An aestheticised providence strains against a divine decree of slavery for generations not yet born.

Abraham is a paradigm of faith. But his doubt is nearly as significant. Late in life he is a loser. His servant, he complains, will inherit his house. God makes promises, but doesn’t deliver. Then God announces that he is going to destroy Sodom, where Abraham’s nephew Lot lives. What you make of what happens next depends on where you lay the emphasis. Abraham, who has not previously been distinguished by his courage (‘who am but dust and ashes’), dares to talk back to God, reminding him, with startling sarcasm, that as judge of all the earth he should not kill the righteous with the wicked. He haggles with God, bargaining him down to sparing the city if ten righteous men can be found within it. Abraham plays no further part, and, in the absence of righteous men, God destroys the city. In fact, God delivers Lot and his family, though the text doesn’t tell us whether Abraham discovers this fact.

Lot has been a surrogate son to him, but Abraham still seems reluctant to plead for him directly. The reason Abraham never pleads for complete mercy, rather than a lesser ruthlessness, is a puzzle. Can God really be haggled with? Why does nobody in the story seem to think human beings can change? These are literary questions, though they have been posed by interpreters who consider the text to be much more than literature. Their potential richness, the prompts to thinking they offer, makes the starkness of Robinson’s reading unsatisfying. She accepts as one of the text’s most painful but frequent assertions that ‘communities as a whole are subject to judgment.’ The Sodom passage seems to her merely a hypothetical used, paradoxically, to demonstrate God’s mercy: Lot is delivered, despite his dubious character, for Abraham’s sake. Sodom’s destruction is proof of its irretrievable wickedness.

What is usually translated as the ‘outcry’ against Sodom is a Hebrew word typically used for complaint against violent political oppression. Political questions are often the premise for Genesis stories: who inherits what, or how to behave with outsiders, or how to contain our propensity to violence. Reading Genesis is only obliquely political, as if it were more concerned with the ethical matrix from which answers to these questions, and thus political decisions, should emerge. Providentialism is sometimes thought to entail a political quiescence (or, as in Calvin, a sharp authoritarianism). Robinson is both a Democrat and a democrat, believing that democracy is the axiomatic consequence of humanity’s creation in the divine image: ‘religious humanism at its highest level’. Yet the parallels she draws between our world and the fallen antediluvian world – the use of ‘peace to study war’, the choice to invest human brilliance ‘in the devising of weapons whose destructive power could hardly be imagined’, while permitting ‘poverty so profound that it unleashed plague’ – brings her close to prophetic invective. The translation of prophetic vision to human government is not so easy. In Robinson’s novels, even political change is treated as a private epiphany, if it happens at all. At his most evasive, sententious and smugly wrong, as when he declares that ‘coloured people’ need to ‘improve themselves, though, if they want to be accepted’, Robinson describes old John Boughton as ‘statesmanlike’. It is not a complimentary adjective.

Reading Genesis’s most compelling passages involve attention to character: the strange bitterness of Rebekah, who plots against her husband; the way Jacob’s fear shapes his anticipated reunion with Esau, the brother he has robbed, or the mysterious incompleteness that makes him so hungry for blessing that he steals and deceives and even wrestles with a god for it. It is the novelist who sees Joseph’s ambiguity: the story’s resolution is based on his refusal to take vengeance on his brothers, and he constructs an elaborate ploy to demonstrate the interruption of this cycle. Yet his political success in Egypt, which allows this resolution and reconciliation, also creates the conditions for his people’s later enslavement. It is the theologian who understands this interruption as grace.

If it was​ Robinson’s goal to prove to ‘cultured despisers’ that there is still life in these texts, that they are still potent goads to ethical, political and spiritual reflection, then – however much we might suspect her providential metaphysics of draining the text of some of its agony and uncertainty – she succeeds. Certainly, the loss of these stories from our culture would diminish us. Yet I reached the end of Reading Genesis with misgivings. Genesis was written among a historically marginal people, and it may be that marginality was the condition which produced its power. It is a sad but abundant historical irony that past oppression can be invoked as a guarantor of moral righteousness, a permanent exculpation, once power is finally attained. Any plea for the grandeur of scripture unmoored from the history of its use is at best incomplete. Interpretive closure turns it into a cudgel. As a member of a group historically tortured and murdered under the rubric of Sodom, this does not seem to me a marginal consideration.

Robinson tells us that ‘a given of the text is that God is interested in human beings’ and that its primary ethical lesson is that ‘to refrain, to put away power’ is Godlike. But which human beings? Merit is a recurrent anxiety for the Hebrew writers. Abraham, who received divine favour without obviously deserving it, finds his counter in Job, whose merit occasions only suffering. Viewed cynically, the covenant with Abraham looks like a protection racket, as hard-headed as the ancient suzerainty treaties from which it borrows its vocabulary. You don’t want to find yourself on the other side of providential history.

Robinson’s ideal may be a community of readers whose grappling with this vast text – a ‘mighty cable’ of countless threads – generates deep and sophisticated ethical reflection. But how many readers are as adept as Robinson? How many as humane, capable and inventive? How many would draw out Genesis’s pattern of forestalled revenge rather than its drive for territory and dominion? This question can also be posed as the relation between text and intuition, freedom and law. It may be a matter for Robinson’s promised sequel on Exodus. Later biblical texts show how difficult it can be to bear the responsibility which is the correlate of freedom: despite Samuel’s warning, the Israelites cry out to have a king, some single, final authority to whom they can defer.

One moment sits like a black hole in Genesis, an exception to Robinson’s claim that it rejects revenge. It is the honour killing story at Shechem, which probably originated as a prohibition against exogamy. Shechem, a young Canaanite man, has sex with Dinah, the sister of Reuben and Simeon. The brothers regard this as a defilement. (Translations often refer to a ‘rape’, though the original verb is less clear.) Shechem’s father proposes marriage between his son and Dinah, and to the Israelites a corresponding settlement and absorption into Canaanite culture. The Israelites purport to agree, provided Shechem’s people all undergo circumcision – the sacred sign of divine covenant. When the men are weakened and sore from the procedure, the Israelites slaughter them all and plunder their city. Jacob’s primary objection to this treacherous massacre is that it damages his reputation. God says and does nothing. Jacob sacrifices, and God renews his promise.

The use of a sacred sign of covenant as a means to commit murder is an obscenity. Shechem is not an unimportant place: before and long after this event, it is where the divine covenant is renewed. Robinson’s austere reading is that God is ‘faithful to this intention, despite appalling human crime, even sacrilege’. She suggests that it is remarkable that a culture should preserve even the stories of its most degraded, least noble actions, ‘as if America had told itself the truth about the Cherokee removal, or England had confessed to the horrors of slavery’. It is indeed remarkable that the text preserves the story without hint of justification. Yet the crime does not occasion divine condemnation, nor oblige penitence. It is the authorising pattern for atrocity. To be memorialised as victims by your killers might be thought poor recompense for annihilation. Who can find majesty in this divine silence? I who am but dust and ashes dare to ask.