The great American writer Marilynne Robinson’s novels and essays are deeply informed by her Christian faith, so it is perhaps no surprise that she has written a commentary on Genesis. In his review, Philip Bunn notes Robinson’s unapologetic embrace of a traditional approach to the Bible, which one might not expect in a work aimed at a broad audience that does not share her religious commitments or her particular brand of Calvinism:
Robinson unabashedly takes stances that will draw ire from some serious historical-critical scholars. For one, she believes Genesis to be scripture, inspired by God and delivered through Moses’ authorship. At the same time, she takes stances that might offend some fundamentalist readers.
She agrees with certain critical scholars who see in Genesis the explicit influence of other Ancient Near East creation myths and flood stories. She herself sees no problem with this influence; it is no mark against Genesis that it bears the influence of the culture in which it was written. In fact, she sees in Genesis the marks of an author, Moses, who is steeped in both Hebrew and Egyptian learning, aware of these other traditions, and willing to provide a divinely inspired counterpoint to them.
“The gods of the Enuma Elish”—a Babylonian creation myth—“suffer hunger, terror, and loss of sleep,” Robinson writes, and they create through acts of cosmic violence, constructing earth and sky and rivers and seas out of corpses and carnage. The contrast to the God of Scripture could not be more poignant: “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.”
It is God’s care for his creation, but particularly the humans made in his image, that is central to both Genesis and Robinson’s interpretation of it.
Read more on Plough: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/bible-studies/and-it-was-good