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From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”
Marilynne Robinson is one of the great living novelists. Her book, “Gilead,” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005. It is easily among my favorite novels. If you have not read it, you really should. But she has all these other beautiful books, “Housekeeping,” “Lila,” “Jack,” many, many more.
Robinson’s work has this quality of glowing. There’s a holiness to it. And she’s been tightening that link in recent years. Her books of essays, her works of nonfiction have been circling her Christianity and her faith and particularly, her readings and relationship to older theologians like John Calvin.
But her latest book goes directly to the source. It is called “Reading Genesis.” And it is exactly that. It is Robinson’s deep reading of the biblical book of Genesis. And I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure what to expect of it. Genesis, if you have read it, is a very strange text — the story of creation, of in the beginning, then the story of Adam and Eve, of Noah and the flood, and then the story of this wandering family, its lineages, its hardships, its crimes against others, against itself, its despairs, its marriages, its children, its deaths.
There’s a lot in Genesis to turn you off religion. It does not have the quality for me, when I read it, that Robinson’s work does. It does not always glow. It does not always give off this holiness. And when I read it when I was young, it was hard for me to look past all the horror in it.
So my experience of reading “Reading Genesis” was unexpected. I was interested. I was intrigued. I love Robinson’s work. And I always feel I should have a deeper literary relationship with the text of the Torah and the Bible, given how central they are in our culture and in my tradition.
But as the book went on — and remember, this is the book, Genesis, where God changes Jacob’s name to Israel, where the promise of Israel the nation is made, my experience of it changed. I came to feel more challenged, more moved, more sad.
We talked about the vengeful, Old Testament God. That’s not what Robinson reads into the text. She reads — and is convincing in this reading — a strange inscrutable forgiveness, a mercy, a grace.
Strangeness is, I think, a big word here. There is a refusal in Genesis that she pulls out to apply past a certain point, easy, retributive, moral logic. It would be a mistake to read her book as a commentary on what is happening in Israel right now. But it’s also impossible to read her book without reflecting on it.
I’ve tried to hold both those things as true in this conversation. This was not meant to be a conversation about Israel in Gaza. It was meant as a break. It was meant as a moment of beauty in a string of difficult episodes of the show, episodes that have left me exhausted and that I know have done the same to some of you.
And this episode is that. There was a lot of beauty in it. But the text is what it is. And so it’s also a moment in which to reflect on the religious question that Israel poses, that it is birthed from, and the cosmic distance between that question and this reality.
As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.
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Marilynne Robinson, welcome to the show.
Great to be here. Thank you.
You have a gorgeous passage about the creation section of Genesis. And you write, “this world is suited to human enjoyment.” You quote Genesis here, saying, “out of the ground made the Lord God, to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight.”
I’d like to talk a little bit, perhaps, about the role beauty plays in this book.
Well, I’m influenced, I know, by traditional theology that has seen beauty as, in many instances, God’s signature in effect. I think that we have desensitized ourselves to beauty quite considerably, the idea that beauty is a harmonizing, interpretive presence in being and that we very seldom refer to in anything like that light. Beauty as, for example, a physicist might use the word, a beautiful formula, a beautiful theory — that’s only used in those special quarters. The idea that God created things from — out of an aesthetic delight in them means that our consciousness and also the perspicacity that’s given to us through beauty as a mode of understanding, that’s something that needs to be recovered. A lot of traditional thought doesn’t make sense to people because it assumes the importance of the beautiful.
One of, I think, the hallmarks of almost all theology, but particularly, close readings of biblical text, is the idea that the words come in the order they do for a reason. So what do you make of beauty coming before the utility of nature? that that the utility humans get from nature, trees make oxygen, trees make food, trees can offer shelter, none of that is mentioned first — and also, coming so early in the text.
Well, God does not need food. God does not need shelter. God does not participate in the satisfaction of these kinds of demands that the world makes on the rest of us. But God can participate in beauty. Even in the creation of the tabernacle in Exodus, the assumption is that beauty is meaningful to God. And it’s something that he conceives, that he wishes to see, that he celebrates the fact of people being able to make real in the world and so on.
God knows beauty. And God enjoys beauty. And he plants the world full of it. We live in his Eden, in a sense.
This is something that I’ve been reflecting on more over the past couple of years. As you say, traditional theology understood beauty as a kind of alignment with God. It’s one reason I think so many of the great structures of beauty, cathedrals and mosques, are religious, so many of the great paintings are religious.
And I would go even a little bit further than you did in that comment. Now it seems like a lot of our artistic culture actively mistrusts beauty. Art is meant to discomfit you. It should be something you grapple with, struggle with. And I don’t want to take anything away. That can be profoundly important as well. But I do think there’s something lost to beauty. I think we consider it, a little bit to our detriment, almost superficial or cheap or possibly misleading, and that there’s something in secularization that is at the root of that, that we’ve rejected this more religious conception of beauty and maybe rejected more than we intended to.
I think that’s true. I think that very often, tendencies in culture like secularism, somehow or other, they internalize the criticisms that are made of them. I’m very pro secularism myself. I very much like the fact that there was a general world in which everyone might feel comfortable and so on.
At the same time, there’s nothing about that should forbid beauty. It’s only the fact that when secularism began to appear, people said it was the opposite of beautiful. People say, OK. And they embrace that. They make it true.
If you understand the capacity for elegance or beauty in any situation or any construction, it’s there. And I think we have impoverished life because we’ve been told that that’s what would happen. And therefore, we have in effect, made it happen.
It does feel to me that you have a deeply Christian relationship to beauty and that that is inflected your novels, which I find, and I think are widely found to be not just uncommonly beautiful, but uncommonly attentive to the existence of beauty.
“Gilead,” I think, is very much this way. It’s very much a constant reminder to see what is around you — that you write about something like laundry, as you do in your book “Housekeeping,” and say something about this line of laundry that it began to, quote, “flutter and tremble and to glare with the light, and that the throes of the thing were as gleeful and strong as if his spirit were dancing in its cerements.”
Is that how you — experience of them? How conscious is this rendering of beauty for you when you’re doing your work?
Well, I would hate to write something that I thought was entirely divorced from the concept of beauty. I think that it’s a disciplining consideration for me, as well as one that alerts me to what it is that I’m remembering out of experience, that I enjoy in the particular way of beauty. I think of it as something that a mind at peace in any degree, and a mind that’s schooled toward good attention, sees beauty all the time.
Do you actually see laundry that way? And if so, how? Or when you sit down to write a book, are you just imagining what it would be like to see laundry the way you wish you could see it?
Well, a lot of the early parts of housekeeping are actually drawn on childhood memory. The whole book has a lot of that in it, for practical reasons. But I used to watch my grandmother or my aunts doing something domestic like hanging laundry, and it had that — they were very powerful figures to me. And what they did was super charged as if it were more than simply drying clothes. It was some mystery that they pursued and that they would, in time, teach to me and so on. When I think of those words and close my eyes, I see my grandmother hanging clothes on a line.
Can I ask about that idea of a mind schooled towards good attention? What do you mean by that?
When I was in high school, I had a teacher who said to our class, you will have to live with your mind every day of your life. So make sure you have a mind that you want to live with. And she was an English teacher. That was exactly what she was talking about. Find things that are beautiful. Expose yourself to them at length. Give them preferential attention. I don’t think anybody ever told me anything that had a bigger impact on my life.
But anybody who understands the aesthetics of anything, music, visual art, so on, it becomes a sensitivity that spreads through experience in general. I think that people that do science or engineering, they are schooled to see what is elegant in a design, whether it’s a design in nature or a design in a laboratory and so on.
We are creatures of education, basically. We educate ourselves continuously, badly or well. And John Ames has been attentive to these things. Many people are.
This reminds me of my favorite line from you, which is a line from John Ames in “Gilead.” He’s the main character in that book. But there’s also my favorite line written by anybody. I actually thought of getting this, I’m going to admit to you, tattooed on me. I have not actually done that.
But you wrote there that, “this is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.” And that relationship of attention and beauty, I remember once I did a silent-meditation retreat. And when I left after a little bit less than a week, I realized I was unsafe to drive because I was so overwhelmed —
Wonderful.
— by just the beauty of the world around me. I couldn’t filter it out. And this was just the normal streets of Oakland, things I pass all the time or did back then, and didn’t think about at all. And the quality of my attention decides whether I’m going to walk down a street and be taken aback by just everything that is around me or walk down a street and notice absolutely nothing that is around me.
Right.
So I want to hold on this idea of schooling your attention a bit. Within some traditions that are, say, Buddhist or others, that would be understood as things like meditation. What is it in your tradition?
My tradition would say basically, in its classic forms, that every experience, every moment, is a question being posed to you by God. What is wanted out of this moment?
Calvin, whom I love and other people disparage without reading, says that whenever another human being confronts you, in effect, you’re being confronted by God himself. And the question is not, what is your interest in this situation, but what is God’s interest? What does he want out of it?
And I think that idea — that reality is essentially challenging you continuously, what do you understand? what do you see? what do you understand as being required of you? so on — it’s a great alertness. And the idea that basically it is God that is posing the question very much exalts all kinds of experience. That’s what I would say, to the extent that I can speak from my culture.
But the early tradition in American, of people like Emerson and Thoreau and so on, I think very much reflect this same sensitivity to the idea that we’re not just drifting through the world, but the world is actually making itself transparent to us, making us interact with it in a way that has every kind of implication. I think that’s an important part of my own habits of attention.
I’d like to move forward in the text a bit to a part that is harder to read as beautiful. A lot is made in biblical criticism, in religious studies, of the resonances between the flood story in The Epic of Gilgamesh and the flood story in Genesis.
You spend some time on the differences here and the similarities. Can you talk through both how the two stories echo and differ, and also what you make of the difference or role it plays in your reading of Genesis?
I think of the flood narrative as old sages you know who said, given the fact that Babylonia is swept away by floods at intervals, that people are indiscriminately destroyed and wealth and structures, everything that we have is destroyed, why did this happen?
And so they take, as a thought problem, the idea of a flood that destroys the world, that destroys the living world. You have, in Genesis, the adoption of the philosophic question. If all human beings were destroyed, why would they be destroyed? What would be the consequence of their destruction?
Noah is rescued because supposedly — the language is, he was righteous in his generation. But we don’t know quite what that means. In any case, we know that immediately when he is on dry land again, he’s no longer terribly righteous.
But in the flood story of Genesis, God, in the first place, says that he will destroy the world because people are only evil in their thoughts from their youth.
And then in the way of a forgiving father, he says, I can’t destroy them because they’re only evil in their thoughts from their youth. In other words, the incorrigible is still loved. It becomes another interpretation of God’s coexistence with human evil, that he understands it as being intrinsic in us, is infuriated by it, or disgusted by it, or whatever the anthropomorphic word would be, but at the end of it, he says this is who they are. This is what they are. He still loves them. He doesn’t want to destroy them. So he begins creation over again.
You mentioned there something that happens right after that story, which is, Noah, back on dry land, does not seem terribly righteous. Do you want to talk a bit about that moment and what you make of God’s very different reaction, having just been so angry at humanity that he wiped almost all of it out? Now the sole human left in that period or one of the sole humans left in that period, the progenitor of all that will come after, is unrighteous, it’s fair to say. And God does not act in that way again. How do you understand what has changed and what happened there?
Yeah, well, God has reconciled himself to the fact that people do things. The word “evil” is a strong word. But nevertheless, the resolution that God comes to, the reconciliation in the narrative of the flood, is that people are what they are. Even Noah, who might only have been relatively righteous in a world where everybody was truly awful, even he falls away and —
Can you say what he does?
Well, he gets drunk. And he is angry at his son for apparently discovering him when he is uncovered in his drunken stupor, and curses somebody else more or less at random. The thing that follows from the flood and from the blessings that fall on human beings after the flood, be fruitful and multiply, they come around to the fact that God’s great vision of blessedness is many people.
What does he promise Abraham? What does he promise Hagar? There will be multitudes of descendants for you. Look at the stars. They will be numerous as the stars. And so the countervailing force in these narratives is, yes, on the one hand, people do things that are appalling. And on the other hand, God enormously values the multitudes of people.
One reading that you have of what happens as creatures begin to oppose him is restraint. And you say this a number of times, that this god is a god now, of restraint. After the flood, whether that is parable or history, there is this new relationship where things that you might think would be punishable go unpunished. Could you talk a bit about that idea, of these places you see restraint, and why you understand that as restraint as opposed to indifference?
Yes, well, I’m of course influenced by the law. I’m influenced by Exodus. In other words, as if the restraint of God, then the next ratcheting is the laws of Moses, in which people are given law that presumably should define their behavior and so on. The fact of law actually frees people or respects their freedom because God does not impose the necessity of behaving in a certain way. He gives the information that this is what you ought to do. And then you react to it freely by accepting or rejecting it.
So in that sense, I see the laws of Moses as another instance of the restraint of God. And I’m speaking of the major ones, the Ten Commandments and so on.
But one of the difficult things about reading Genesis specifically is that you begin with a God who is making everything happen, who is intensely causal, creating rest and light and animals and every other living and nonliving thing, who is creating floods that wipe out virtually everything there is, who is wiping out Sodom and Gomorrah.
And then as you move to the story of the Hebrews, you have a lot of terrible things happen that go unpunished. You have these betrayals. You have these massacres. You have these ways in which people mistreat each other.
And it begins to pose a problem that I think most of us face in life, which is, why would— how would — a just God permit any of this? Meanwhile, that’s happening among the very people he is in communication with.
Tell me a bit about how you read the relationship the God of Genesis has to the evil done by his chosen people?
I don’t think that the idea of chosen people ever means that they are exempt from human failure or sin or misfortune. God knows. The end of Genesis is the beginning of the enslavement in Egypt. I think they’re chosen in the sense that people that are extremely fit and resilient are chosen, not in the sense of people who are morally impeccable or anything else.
Their role is to be representative of humankind. They’re chosen in that sense. So they have the faults of humankind. And God’s dealing with them, therefore, generalizes to his dealings with the world at large.
But I do see a ratcheting down. I do see God as negotiating with people because the ultimate demonstration of his power is that he seems actually to have made a creature that is outside his control in very essential ways — or very approximately out of his control, presumably, not ultimately. In a certain sense, the freer human beings are, the greater God is because he’s able to make creatures that actually oppose him.
I think that’s one of the things that the whole text, beginning and end, tries to impose on our thinking, is that God loves people. And he does so faithfully. And he does so through all kinds of turmoil and shock and disappointment, all of which are. In their very outrageous ways, proof of the fact that he loves us so well that he even allows us our autonomy.
And specifically in Genesis, he loves, attaches himself, develops a relationship with very ordinary people. In Gilgamesh, in the Greek myths, these are about heroes. These are about characters who feel larger than life.
But when you look at the characters of Genesis, Abraham is basically a shepherd. Hagar is a servant. Jacob — these are ordinary people. They do good and they do bad. Often they just don’t do all that much of anything at all. They struggle to get their kid married off and then have some internal family drama and then that’s the end of them. What do you make of the ordinariness of the people who end up being the crucial lineage of Genesis?
Well first of all, I would say it’s universalism. We have no right to assume that anyone who exists is of less value to God than anybody else. And this is very extraordinary and very uncharacteristic of any period or literature, let alone ancient literature.
The other thing is, of course, that people who are powerful, like Moses when he’s a Prince in Egypt, they think that they are efficacious. They think that they are determining history and so on. And in fact, Moses has to be, in effect, made a shepherd before he assumes the actual role of acting out the power of God rather than his own power in history, in the world.
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One of the central ideas in your reading of Genesis is that it is a book about forgiveness. You write toward the end of your book, quote, “The Book of Genesis is framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, of Cain by the Lord and of his 10 brothers by Joseph.”
Could you first describe those stories, what does Cain do, and what do the 10 brothers of Joseph do and then how the forgiveness operates in both?
Well, the case of Cain and Abel, Cain and Abel both make sacrifices to God. Abel’s is accepted. Cain’s is not. No explanation of that. But Cain is sick with jealousy that he has not pleased God and Abel has. So he takes him out into a field, which means premeditation, and he kills him. God knows that he’s killed Abel, of course. His brother’s blood cries out to him from the Earth.
And so Cain says something that is really not very well translated or translatable, perhaps. He says, my crime is greater than I can bear. But he can also be understood as saying, my punishment is greater than I can bear. So from the point of view of God hearing him say this, was he saying, I can’t bear the fact that I killed Abel or that I can’t bear the fact that I’m being cast out? Maybe both simultaneously.
But these are things where, again, God could feel compassion for someone afflicted by what is, first of all, disappointed love because he wanted to give something to God that God did not accept — of course, God tells him do it better next time — and then also the fact that he has killed his brother.
In any case, Cain goes away from his father and mother. But he builds a city. And he has a son. And he names the city for the son. And all sorts of creative people, people to whom are attributed musical instruments and working with bronze and so on, are supposed to have come from Cain’s city, which suggests Cain, in the way of people that are supposedly cast out or punished, he seems to have gone on to have quite a life.
In the case of Joseph, Joseph is the son of Rachel, the wife that Jacob loves especially and that he really intended to marry when in fact, he was given her sister in marriage and so on. She does not bear children easily. She has one son who is very much favored by his father. And the older brothers are so jealous of him that they take the opportunity to throw him into a pit. They decide that they’ll sell him rather than kill him.
So he goes into Egypt. And it’s just characteristic of Joseph that he does things incredibly well. And he’s very successful. And he takes on the role of running the household of a Potiphar, the first Egyptian that he’s enslaved by. And then he runs the household of Pharaoh and takes Egypt and the whole region through a terrible famine by storing up grain because he knows from a dream that there will be a famine, and then selling it back to the people when the famine actually comes.
But his brothers have to leave Canaan and come to Egypt to ask for food from this bank of food that Joseph has amassed there. And there he is, very Egyptian, speaking Egyptian, eating apart from the Hebrews because Egyptians don’t eat with Hebrews and all the rest.
He said — like the disguised avenger at the end of Odysseus, where Odysseus comes back and finds people in his wife’s house who have been suitors for her, who have been hangers on and all the rest of it, and so he insinuates himself into the household, and then he massacres everybody.
You have Joseph in basically the same situation. He’s not recognized. He’s completely powerful. And his brothers expect him to be vengeful in the way that Ulysses is. And Joseph, instead, pardons them. He says, you intended this for evil but God intended it for good. And I’ve been able to save many lives coming here — which is true.
And so he pardons them and seems to pardon them very earnestly. And those are the two framing gestures of forgiveness.
One thing you say is you’re thinking about the Joseph story is that you understand this is a gift given to him, in a way, the ability to forgive, that it is a triumph of a very particular hero’s journey, to be in a position to punish, in a position where perhaps punishment would be expected, even merited, but then also be able to feel grace. You talk about what he offers is not a pardon but grace. Can you talk a bit about that difference?
Well, he embraces them as brothers. He weeps on their shoulders. He is not saying, I have taken account of your crimes against me, and I’m going to forgive you anyway, or give you amnesty anyway. He is saying, that never happened. What I interpreted as injury does not count as injury because it enabled me to save your lives, actually.
It’s a very, very beautiful image of grace that I think of having no parallel in ancient literature. To be able to look beyond the offense rather than to forgive the offense, I think, is the difference between grace and simple forgiveness.
From what we’re saying here, Joseph sounds, in a way, like a simple hero. And that isn’t quite what he is in the book, and very much not how you portray him. In this period when he has risen to this position of immense power, where he has seen the coming of the famine, he is prepared for the coming of the famine, and he is doling out food during the famine, he is also — in Genesis’s telling, in your telling — somewhat responsible for the spread of slavery in Egypt, slavery under which the Jewish people will then exist in labor. Can you talk a bit about that?
Well, it’s part of the very special genius of the Bible. It sees no one as simple. And it absorbs into itself information that complicates the movement of history. It’s extraordinary in that sense, that when you consider who was writing this and who it was written for, it would be the easiest thing in the world to make Joseph the simple, straightforward hero.
But in fact, in a way that is incredibly psychologically shrewd, it sees him as super serviceable. He’s too willing to enrich the pharaoh, as he had been, too willing to enrich Potiphar, too willing to serve the jailer as an even better jailer.
It’s a recognizable human type, in a certain sense, the too-good soldier.
You make much of something that comes later in the books, in Deuteronomy, that says, “thou shalt not abhor an Egyptian because thou wast a stranger in his land.” Later you write that the Egyptian has grievances too and that one of the lessons of the Bible is that it is never so simple.
I’m curious to have you talk a little bit more about that, about the emergent picture of culpability, of justice, of justice versus mercy. We often talk about the Old Testament God as a vengeful God, as an eye for an eye God. That isn’t how you see them. Why?
Well, I think one of the things that runs along continuously with the biblical narrative is that it’s clear to us — a formula like an eye for an eye is very straightforward, very evenly applied, apparently, at the same time that what Moses is saying is, you can only take an eye for an eye. There can only be an equivalence. If someone breaks your arm, that doesn’t give you the right to kill them.
So the idea of this lex talionis, as they call it, the law of equivalence, is that it acknowledges the possibility that revenge of a certain kind can be necessary in a social situation or a personal situation. But it cannot exceed exacting a harm that is equivalent to the harm that is done.
So even though it sounds harsh to us — and maybe it’s not. Maybe we’re not living by that standard. I sometimes think we’re very punitive society. But nevertheless, revenge is a very simple concept that people master readily. And they think, somebody does something to me and I’m going to — I will be your retribution, I will be your justice, that sort of thing, where he’s talking about some kind of reaction that vastly exceeds any specific provocation. That tends to be a tendency of the unexamined human mind. But we have that running as a theme in our minds.
Am I right there, that you’re quoting Donald Trump?
You’re so right.
I just wanted to draw that out, that what you were saying —
[LAUGHS] It’s shocking to hear. He’s definitely pre-Moses in terms of his acuity as an interpreter of law and justice.
I shall be your vengeance is not one of his more subtle comments.
[LAUGHS] So true. In any case, people read the Old Testament and they want to see revenge. And that’s what they see, even though very characteristically, this is not what is there to be seen. We are a fallen species.
In any case, we have incorporated words like vengeance and so on into the text that don’t really belong there because that comes out of medieval French. And it doesn’t translate well a word in Hebrew that should mean judgment, which means that either you are vindicated or you are found at fault. It doesn’t mean vengeance in the sense that we use the word, that you irritated me, I’m going to whack your family, that sort of thing.
Same with the word jealous. It’s an inappropriate word in this context. And the Jewish Publication Society says passionate where we say jealous. And I think that it’s an infinitely more sensible translation. So part of the idea of the harshness of God is a consequence of the ways that traditional translation have supplied language that is not good language in terms of the text. And this is virtually never what the text is actually telling you.
This, to me, was central to your reading of Genesis. And it was a way I had never read it or seen it read, which is, at least after the flood, you in some ways read Genesis as almost a history of punishments not meted out, at least not meted out by God.
You can go through the offenses of Cain against Abel, of Joseph’s brothers against Joseph, of the killing of this whole town after the rape of a Hebrew woman, of one murder and beating and affront after another. And here’s this God, who has been established early in the text as capable of enormous punishment, enormous power.
And that God keeps, for the most part, standing by. And then things that you would not expect emerge out of that — again, do you go back to your word, “restraint.”
You write at some point that “we are instead to learn that mercy is nearer than justice to godliness and that mercy can release an abundance far exceeding whatever might come of attempting to impose justice.” Tell me a bit about that reading.
Well, I was speaking there specifically about the fact that God does not carry out vengeance against Cain and that he feeds into this great stream of emerging humanity with his son and his town and all the rest of it, and that there are people that are wonderful and people that are problematical in all this stream of population.
But if you extinguish one of them, there is nothing in the text that implies that you have not also extinguished wonderful descendants that they would have had if they had lived. And so the creative presence of human beings is cherished in the fact of their all being allowed to live and propagate because we have no idea what will emerge in human terms as a consequence of these lives being allowed to go on and prosper.
The way forgiveness, the way mercy, the way grace operates in Genesis, in your reading, is also backed by omnipotence. God has a plan that is working out in ways we cannot understand but that God can understand. And so God’s ability to see his aims realized without punishing Cain or Jacob or whomever is still there.
When you ask for the jump — not you personally, but religion — to human lives, we don’t get that guarantee. If someone wrongs us, we don’t know that there is a plan. And for all we know, our plan requires retribution or it requires punishment. But within a society — and obviously rules and laws will become very important in Exodus and Deuteronomy — but within a society, forgiveness is a powerful ideal. But also, if somebody keeps stealing or setting buildings on fire, you’re going to want to do something about that even if you are personally merciful. How do you think about that, that difference? What lesson do you take of forgiveness for human beings, given that we do not necessarily have a plan? We have to operate here in the sad, temporal present?
That’s a very serious question. I think that the bias in human society is so punitive that indiscriminate forgiveness would probably bring us to a more approximate relationship to justice than our habits of punishment do.
Every once in a while I read about people, 19-year-olds that go to prison because it’s the third time they’ve stolen a candy bar sort of things, that are just horrible to think of from a biblical point of view. We dispose of people that might be problematic. I think that’s true, however the process of justice might or might not work.
And sometimes social safety requires that people be imprisoned. I doubt it ever requires that they be killed. But in many, many cases, I think that if we showed mercy, showed grace, we would do less harm than we do by brutalizing people, in effect, taking away — I’ve been in prisons a few times to do readings and things like that.
And they’re a bunch of 19-year-old guys. And they’re in there for x number of years. And how are they ever going to learn how to live in the world if the only experience they have, even from late childhood, in effect, is incarceration? things like this where punishment is so destructive that if it can possibly be supplanted, we would probably be a saner, healthier society.
Most of the virtues that exist throughout the books of the Torah, of the Bible, I think, are things we talk about today, at least, mercy and grace and forgiveness and things like that, humility. The one that is very, very, very, very, very important in Genesis particularly, that I think we do not talk about very much in contemporary, at least American culture, is hospitality. It comes up with Abraham, how you treat the stranger. It comes up with Sodom and Gomorrah. It comes up repeatedly as almost a central bar that characters have to clear for godliness, for worthiness.
Can you talk a bit about how you understand hospitality in Genesis and also what you think has happened to it as an idea or ideal now?
Well, people who were strangers, people who were traveling, they were very vulnerable to robbery or abuse or anything. When people say, we’ll sleep outside, and then Lot or Abraham says, no, no, come into my house, this is a very basic attempt to establish their safety. I think that under most circumstances, people that were strangers were people on hard times.
And one of the things that I think is very moving about the laws is that these festivals, which are sacrifices, which are whatever they are, nevertheless, the stranger has to be included along with the Levite and the widow and so on.
This refusal to draw a line and say, these are our people and these are not — the refusal to deny responsibility for the well being of some waif who just shows up — and the same is shown in Moses laws about people being able to glean in the fields or in the grape arbors, putting aside this national identity that’s so powerful a motive and an idea for Moses, there is this fact that we live in a world that is not alien, that is not exclusive, finally, that we want to see fed and sheltered.
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I found reading the last third of your book a surprisingly emotional and intense experience. Because what is Genesis about? Well, one thing it is about is both the birth of the lineage and the divine promise that will result in Israel. Jacob, after wrestling with God, with the angel, depending on how you read that story, is renamed “Israel.”
There is the promise of multiplicity, the promise of a great nation. That nation, to some degree, exists now. And this was I assume not the condition when you were writing the book, but in the moment I am reading it, is engaged in this profoundly destructive war, was attacked terribly, has killed many multiples in its counterattack.
Having sat so much now in this book that is in part about Israel, and then watching the modern incarnation of that promise in this moment, what have you been thinking?
I’ve been thinking, in a certain sense, that what is made known to us, in everything that emerges in Genesis and the law and the prophets, has surpassed its original intended audience. Israel now, I think of, as being a nation of the mind — without prejudice to the modern incarnation of Israel, I think it always probably has its primary reality as the idea that was, in a sense, negotiated between God and Moses, the idea of land that could not be alienated, festivals that always fed the widows and the orphans, the openness of the fields to gleaning by anyone who needed to eat, leaving them open to the — once every seven years for wild animals to wander through and all the rest of it.
This is a very beautiful dream that would have very powerful implications for any society that took it seriously. When Moses gathers up these people, who have been eliminated culturally, and takes them with him into the wilderness, and recreates them as a civilization, he’s doing what Plato does in the Republic.
He’s creating an ideal culture with very ancient features like debt forgiveness and so on, very strict limits on enslavement for example, various things like that, that are enormously enlightened by the standards of that period or any period, unfortunately. But in any case, he’s creating the idea of a country, as Plato was in his “Republic.”
We know from reading on, beyond the books of Moses, that people had enormous difficulty realizing anything that looked like anything that Moses would have wished. And maybe at the moment, that society is not historic Israel. But I don’t feel that I’m at all in a position to judge.
I’m not asking you to judge or to appear here as an expert on the conflict. I’ll speak for myself, which is, as a Jewish person, I struggle a lot with what it means to think of Israel as a Jewish state and of course, to think of it as which Jewish state, what kind of Judaism.
I’ve always identified with what gets called diasporic Judaism, exilic Judaism, the Judaism of the wanderer, of the stranger. I wonder about what it means — what having a state does to people, what having that much to protect does to you. And a lot of these books that we’re talking about are about wandering and about expulsion and about displacement.
But it was striking to me, because I think forgiveness is so often associated with the New Testament, with what comes later, that you understood Genesis, which is, again, the book where the beginning of the idea of Israel emerges, that you understood it to be a book about forgiveness. That’s not how I’ve ever understood it, which is partially why I found this a little shocking and challenging to read.
But you write towards the end that “in every instance where it arises, forgiveness is rewarded by consequences that could not have been foreseen or imagined. The application of this doctrine is straightforward.”
And that did lead me to think, if you understand there is a connection between this book and that state, what one should say about that, if it makes it look more tragic that this is an unseen lesson, if it makes it just natural that this is retribution — and you see that often.
And God does not exactly judge, at least in the moment. There is certainly plenty of bloodshed — how one is to think about what you say is a straightforward application of at least godly forgiveness, in Genesis, and the complete inability to have any such thing in the region of the world that now bears his name.
Yes, well, Israel historically, in modern history, is such a radical statement of the question of how to respond to injury. It overwhelms the terms of the question, the modern history of it. I’m speaking, of course, of the Holocaust.
I think it would be better for the ultimate safety of Israel and the ultimate identity of Israel as itself if it had not taken such an extreme vengeful posture. And I think that that’s consistent with the text. I think it’s consistent with much experience, although — [SIGHS] — the whole thing is very sad.
I absolutely love Genesis. I’m writing now about Exodus, which I absolutely love. These ideas of justice and society and so on are just very movingly beautiful to me. And I’m certainly pained to think that they are not influencing modern inheritors.
Can I ask you about Exodus?
Sure.
There’s a part of that book that has always, always almost troubled me more than anything else in the Torah. I find the Exodus story, in many ways, extraordinarily beautiful. I think there’s probably no story in the Bible, in the Torah, that has done as much good as the Exodus story, that has been as inspiring as it.
And yet the repeated hardening of the pharaoh’s heart by God, this being a place where God does intervene, at least textually, after plagues — so a plague will happen. And at least across some of them, it will seem that the pharaoh is ready to let the Hebrew people go. And then God will intervene to harden his heart. And he does not. What do you make of that?
Well, it’s a curious thing. I haven’t gotten to that part — writing. But I will say that in that odd way that things work in scripture, Pharaoh is actually exonerated by the fact that God does not give that decision to him. It is God that hardens Pharaoh’s heart. It’s not Pharaoh that hardens Pharaoh’s heart.
And that is simply another instance of that very surprising tendency scripture always has, to obscure blame, to deflect condemnation in a certain sense. The whole passage is very problematic.
But it’s also true that at the beginning of Exodus, you have Moses appearing like the young, revolutionary leader who has this overview of things and his habits of command, and he’s going to rescue his people that he actually identifies with. And no, he ends up running off and becoming a shepherd. He’s denounced by a Hebrew for killing an Egyptian, which is so typical, so how things happen.
Can you spend a moment on that part of the story? Because this part is in Genesis. And your book reminded me of it. And it is very interesting. Moses does kill this Egyptian who is abusing a Hebrew. And then seems reasonable to think he will get credit for it. And instead — and what the text includes, given that it does not include all that much, is important — he’s, as you put it, taunted for it by Hebrews.
Can you talk through that moment and what you make of it?
Well, it’s the one human voice that arises out of the 400 dark years of enslavement is this Hebrew, saying, are you going to kill us like you killed the Egyptian? [LAUGHS] Who made you ruler over us? this wonderful voice that is not what you expect, that is not going to say, oh, Savior, you’ve come to get us out of trouble.
But from that point on, the liberation of Israel is the work of God. And it’s quite stark. It involves plagues and all the rest of it. But it also means that Hebrews don’t do anything themselves that would put them into the category of armed insurrection or anything. Basically, they walk away.
That, again, is a very striking thing because you know exactly what the possibilities are because the pharaoh is so frightened of them, clearly afraid that they will take up arms. And they won’t. They don’t. And the rescue of them is accomplished by God, partly by his making it clear that Pharaoh is not a god himself, which would be assumed, that he was a divinized figure.
But anyway, rather than have a story of heroic violence, that you would have in a Spartacus revolution, you have Moses coming to Pharaoh over and over again for permission — isn’t that amazing? Really? OK, take your cattle. You can take your cattle. [LAUGHS] You would think that Moses would feel that history was at his back, that he could in fact tell the pharaoh that he’s leaving, rather than ask if he can leave.
It’s just an extraordinary, atypical narrative of its kind in the way that it obscures questions of blame, relieves questions of vindictive violence coming at the end of enslavement. It’s very striking.
These books are, in a way that you get it so well, they are so strange. You brought this up earlier, but the good that could have been done for the Hebrews, for the characters of them, with a couple of redactions here and there.
Maybe don’t mention the part of [INAUDIBLE] where the town is told to circumcise itself to prepare for the marriage and then on the third day after the circumcision, everybody’s slaughtered — or all the men are slaughtered at least — and their wives are taken and their livestock are taken. There’s so much that could have been left out, that strange moment between Moses and the killing of the Egyptian, or if the killing of the Egyptian is not like the Hebrew taunting him over it.
One way of thinking about the Bible is that it’s all these different people writing. And that may or may not be true. I don’t pretend to know. But even there, no editor, coming one after the other, would have made the choices this set of books make. There is a deep inscrutability to it, the endless merging of the quotidian and the holy and things that make the people who are meant to be followed here look terrible.
And I’m curious what you make of it. I believe you believe there were human hands in its creation. But how do you, as somebody who does construct books and edit them, how do you understand those human hands as having made any decisions?
One might use a word “inspiration,” I suppose. They go back to their own texts all the time. It’s a very self-referential literature. And they seem to get the point. They seem to be able to carry forward the things about it that are most striking, the things that are most different from other Mediterranean literatures, classical literatures. They see the moral genius of the text, which is very counterintuitive in most cases. And they can extend that. They can do new variations on it.
I have a very, very high estimate of human beings, which answers a lot of questions for me. I think that the writers and sustainers of this tradition were not only brilliant, but also devoted. They were faithful to the text. And the impulse to change it, the impulse to edit uncomfortable things out of it, they were too devout, really, I think, to fall into that temptation.
Did experiencing Genesis at this level of depth change you at all? You’re a religious person. You were before you entered this project. But this is a real — both within the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition, deeply engaging with these books is, I think, considered one of the most important forms of spiritual practice. How were you changed?
I began with a very high but quite undifferentiated admiration for the text. I didn’t quite know what I was responding to, except I loved the way it reappears in the Psalms and Job and so many places.
But I’ve always been very disturbed by something that a lot of Christians do, which is talk about the God of the Old Testament as being different from the God of the New Testament. This makes no sense at all, because Jesus is very inclined to say that God is his father and also, under certain circumstances, to say that he himself is God, very monotheistically, of course.
But in any case, the split in the two texts encourages misreading of the Old Testament because you’re supposed to find vengeance. People say, oh, Jesus said, love your neighbor. Well, yes, he did. And so did Leviticus. So often, Jesus is quoting the Old Testament. And we’d have a much richer sense of what Jesus is teaching if we looked at what he’s quoting.
And it makes no sense to separate them, as if to say that they’re proceeding from opposite stances, opposite theologies. I don’t want to sound like I’m encroaching on Judaism or anything like that. But from a Christian point of view, it’s only destructive to say that love your enemy is an idea that is exclusive to Jesus when in fact, in the text, it’s perfectly clear where he’s quoting from. I think it’s a loss to both traditions, to act as if they are opposed.
I think that’s a good place to come to an end. So then, let me ask what is always our final question, which is, what are three books you would recommend to the audience?
Oh, I’m a scandal. I don’t keep up with contemporary writing because I have this parallel life of being interested in Shakespeare and so on. I spend a good deal of time, for a while, looking at The Acts and Monuments of the Martyrs, which is a neglected, major source for Shakespeare’s plays.
I’m very interested in the 14th century, which was terrible because it had wars and famine and plague and so on, but which produced a great deal of very beautiful writing. One of my favorite books is “Piers Plowman,” William Langland, coming out of the 14th century.
I just finished reading “Theologia Germanica” which was an anonymous work, 14th century, written in German, which is really a very strong alternative interpretation of Christianity, in effect. It was very influential in the Reformation in Germany.
And I read that kind of thing. And other people think, why do I read that kind of thing? But it absolutely, utterly fascinates me. It’s great happiness to me that I have time and resources to do that kind of reading.
I love that. Marilynne Robinson, thank you very much.
It was a pleasure, great pleasure.
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This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing from Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. We’ve original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special Thanks to Sonia Herrero and Alex Engebretsen.
