“The gods of the Enuma Elish” – a Babylonian creation myth – “suffer hunger, terror, and loss of sleep,” Marilynne Robinson writes in Reading Genesis, 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.” This unique character outlined at the beginning of the work sets the stage for the rest of Robinson’s interpretation: “In Genesis, from the first, good is intrinsic to the whole of creation.” 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: “Why do human beings exist? The God of Genesis is unique in his having not a use, but instead a mysterious, benign intention for them.”

Robinson sees Genesis as a key to  interpreting the rest of Scripture.