But so much of Genesis is not about “intervention” exactly, but about the slow unfolding of moral truth in the chequered lives of highly fallible individuals. As Robinson spells it out, the deepest miracle in the Genesis stories is that the culture in which they were brought together in their present form made no excuses for ancestral folly or even atrocity, needed no illusions about the absolute and intrinsic righteousness of their tribal heroes, but saw their task as tracing God’s consistent, re-creating judgement through the long and serpentine course of human interactions. The magnificent story of Joseph and his brothers is perhaps the most sophisticated and humanly subtle example. What should provoke our wonder and our faith is not a steady stream of marvels and magic, but the fact that the Jewish foundation story does not need to pretend that its heroes are anything other than painfully human.
“It is as if,” writes Robinson, in a stark and timely passage, “America had told itself the truth about the Cherokee removal or England had confessed to the horror of slavery in the West Indies.” But the Jewish belief that this particular community was uniquely engaged with the action of God meant that “every aspect of its history [was] too significant to conceal.” In a world of manically, violently self-justifying national narratives, from the USA to the Middle East to China, this is every bit as revolutionary as when Genesis was first composed. A history “too significant to conceal”: the phrase challenges the shallowness of a lot of current polemic.
However, this is not a book with a single argument to make. It invites us to take time in reading the stories again, in the company of an exceptionally wise and perceptive storyteller, one of the foremost novelists today in the English language. Many readers of Marilynne Robinson’s fiction have spoken of the sense of “authority” that they feel in her writing – the unanswerable clarity of someone who simply points to what is there. She illustrates as decisively as possible the difference it makes when a writer is manifestly more interested in what their attention is drawn to than in their own state of mind or feeling; and this is what is very much in evidence here. Her style as an essayist has always been lapidary and uncompromising. Impatient readers might find it dogmatic, and complain that it does not invite much in the way of dialogue. But she is a writer who clearly believes that dialogue is more than just an easy chat. First, stop and look together at what is being shown you; then digest and respond as best you can, not so much to the one showing you as to the landscape shown.
The book contains as an appendix the entire text of Genesis in the Revised Standard Version. My one serious query was whether Robinson might usefully have chosen another version – either the King James translation, or one of the very adventurous new renderings of recent decades (by scholars like Robert Alter, Mary Phil Korsak) which try to capture more vividly the distinctive flavour of Hebrew idioms. But this choice takes nothing away from the depth and gravity of her reading. This is not an easy or a quick read, but it is a work of exceptional wisdom and imagination, a real model of how to read the biblical text with the eyes of an adult faith.
Rowan Williams is the former Archbishop of Canterbury. Reading Genesis is published by Virago at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
