While some have argued that Robinson fails to fully account for human depravity and God’s anger with sin in the book, it is hard to see how she sidesteps them, writing poignantly about Cain’s murder of Abel, Noah’s cursing of his grandson, the relationship between Jacob and Esau, and all the other human misdeeds in Genesis. The very first sentence of Reading Genesis is this: “The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil” (3). The evil in Reading Genesis is ours.
From beginning to end of Reading Genesis, we are reminded of our evil. Robinson argues that one of the significant contrasts between Genesis and the Babylonian epics is “human culpability” (19). We are almost absurdly bad. Cain kills Abel and asks for help to avoid being murdered himself. Noah, rescued from the flood with his family, almost immediately “brings transgression into the restored world” with his drunken generational cursing (38). Sarah wants Hagar sent out into the desert to die. So many passages in Genesis present “another situation in which the judgment of God might be looked for” (88). As we see the human tendency to error and correctly identify it in ourselves, we may experience a sense of desolation and despair. Our wrongness can provoke “fits of wrath, grief, and anguish,” like Boethius in his cell.
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