Commentary Compass

John Goldingay’s Genesis is distinctive less because every conclusion is novel than because of the questions he asks and the tensions he is willing to preserve. Divine sovereignty sits alongside genuine human agency; God’s prior knowledge alongside the narrative force of “now I know”; historical claims alongside imaginative storytelling; and covenant promise alongside deeply flawed human actors. His most rewarding insights therefore often emerge not from isolated technical notes but from sustained attention to what the story itself is doing.

What makes Goldingay distinctive

Goldingay’s working method helps explain the character of the commentary. He began by translating and interpreting the Hebrew text for himself, deliberately postponing consultation of most secondary literature. Only afterward did he widen the conversation to include early Jewish and Christian interpreters, medieval Jewish commentators, the Reformers, major nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarship and more recent work. He explicitly says that he does not assume that either the majority view or the newest view is necessarily right, and he acknowledges when his own reading is idiosyncratic.

The result is a commentary that frequently feels exploratory rather than merely adjudicative. Goldingay is interested in what characters know and do not know, how God works through decisions that remain genuinely human, how apparently accidental events participate in providence, and how people outside the chosen family can sometimes perceive things that the insiders miss. His strongest discussions tend to be passages where Genesis itself leaves theological questions open rather than tidily resolving them.

What does “Now I know” mean?

One of Goldingay’s most arresting comments comes at the climax of the binding of Isaac, when God says to Abraham, “Now I know that you fear God.” Goldingay resists explaining the words away as though nothing has actually become known. The test has reached a genuine outcome: Abraham’s obedience has now happened, and God acknowledges what Abraham has demonstrated.

Yet this is not a straightforward claim that God previously lacked knowledge of Abraham’s future action. Goldingay explicitly says that in some sense God knew beforehand, because God’s being extends through all time. His point is subtler: knowing beforehand what will happen is not identical to knowing an event as something that has actually occurred. The “now” therefore retains real narrative and theological force without requiring the conclusion that God was simply ignorant of the future.

This makes Goldingay more nuanced than the label “open theism” might suggest. His language about a genuine before and after in God’s experience will certainly make some readers uncomfortable, and more traditional accounts of divine knowledge will formulate the matter differently. But he simultaneously affirms prior divine knowledge. The real issue is therefore not simply whether God knows the future, but whether God’s knowledge of a freely enacted event can have a new relational or experiential dimension once that event becomes actual.

A useful comparison is Kenneth Mathews. Mathews likewise takes the “now I know” language seriously as part of the narrative’s movement toward discovery, but explicitly says that the test is not required because God lacks knowledge; rather, Abraham’s potential faith becomes concrete obedience, producing a deepened relationship. Goldingay therefore stands somewhat farther toward preserving the temporal force of God’s words, but the distance between the two readings is smaller than the labels sometimes imply.

This is a good example of Goldingay at his best. The interpretation is provocative, but the provocation comes from refusing to make the wording of the narrative disappear too quickly. Even readers who finally prefer a more classical formulation of divine knowledge may find that Goldingay has made them attend more carefully to what “now” contributes to the story.

Genesis 45 and 50: Providence without puppetry

Goldingay’s treatment of Joseph provides a particularly fruitful account of divine providence because he refuses to resolve the tension between God’s purpose and human agency. Joseph can say both that his brothers intended evil against him and that God sent him to Egypt. For Goldingay, neither statement cancels the other: the brothers genuinely made their own morally responsible decision, yet the same event also belonged to God’s prior purpose of preserving life.

Goldingay therefore rejects two easy explanations. God did not merely stand back, permit the brothers’ wrongdoing, and subsequently turn it to good; yet neither did God manipulate them like puppets into actions they did not genuinely choose. Genesis presents one event with two intentional agents whose purposes are radically different. The brothers mean harm; God means preservation. How those two forms of agency coincide is affirmed rather than mechanically explained.

What makes the discussion especially useful is Goldingay’s survey of the different ways divine and human action interact throughout Genesis. Sometimes people initiate and God responds; sometimes God commissions and people respond; sometimes human plans fail because God purposes otherwise; and sometimes God works through events without the human participants even recognising what he is doing. The Joseph story therefore becomes not a formula for providence but the climax of a much richer pattern running through Genesis.

This is also a place where Goldingay’s distinctiveness is more productive than eccentric. Other commentators readily affirm that God uses the brothers’ evil actions for his larger purposes; for example, Longman reads Joseph’s suffering retrospectively through Genesis 50:20 as God using the brothers’ wrongdoing to bring Joseph into the position from which he could preserve the family. Goldingay presses the question one stage further: precisely what do we mean by “God used it” if both divine intention and genuine human intention are to be taken seriously?

I find this one of Goldingay’s more persuasive distinctive contributions. He does not eliminate mystery by pretending to explain the mechanics of providence. Instead he sharpens the theological claim: human freedom and responsibility are real, but they do not place history outside God’s purposeful action.

There is an important contrast here with the discussion of Genesis 22. Goldingay’s willingness to speak of genuine interaction between God and human beings can sound unusually open-ended, yet the Joseph narrative prevents that emphasis from becoming a picture of a merely reactive God. Here God’s purpose precedes and encompasses human action even while the human actors remain genuinely responsible for what they intend and do.

Genesis 16: Seeing Hagar as a person

Goldingay is particularly good when Genesis shifts attention away from its principal patriarchal figures. In Genesis 16 he notices something easy to overlook: the narrator tells us Hagar’s name, but Abraham and Sarah never use it. To them she is simply “my” or “your” maidservant. To Yahweh, however, she is an individual—the object of divine attention and care rather than merely the means by which Abraham and Sarah might obtain a child.

That observation becomes part of a larger reading of Hagar as an unexpectedly important theological figure. God hears the harsh treatment she has received, promises a future for her son, and gives to her personally the promise of innumerable offspring—a promise otherwise associated with the patriarchal family. Goldingay then makes much of Hagar’s response: she becomes the first person in the story to give God a name, “God of seeing,” holding together both the God who sees her and the God whom she has encountered.

Goldingay memorably calls Hagar a theologian. The point is more than rhetorical. Her theology arises from encounter: the socially vulnerable outsider perceives something true about God because God has first perceived her. This fits a recurring strength of the commentary—Goldingay often notices theological insight coming from characters who stand outside the obvious centre of the promise.

The basic emphasis on God seeing and hearing Hagar is certainly not unique to Goldingay; other strong Genesis commentators make similar observations. His distinctive contribution lies more in the accumulation of narrative details—the naming and non-naming, Hagar’s agency, her status within Abraham’s household, the promise of offspring, and her act of naming God—which together make her much more than a supporting character in Abraham’s story.

Genesis 1-11: History told through imaginative story

Another distinctive feature appears in Goldingay’s discussion of what kind of narrative Genesis is. He rejects the simple choice between “history” and “fiction.” Genesis, in his view, makes claims about things God really did: God created the world, humanity rebelled, and God began working to put things right. Yet Genesis communicates those realities through literary and imaginative forms that should not automatically be treated like a modern documentary account.

For Genesis 1–11 he eventually uses the expression “historical parable.” The opening chapters refer to real beginnings and real divine-human history, but tell that history symbolically and through traditional material reshaped to proclaim the truth about God, humanity and the world. Thus a talking snake, the trees of Eden and other extraordinary features are not reasons for him to dismiss Genesis as unreal; neither does he think their theological truth depends on reading every narrative detail as straightforward modern historiography.

This approach will not persuade every reader, particularly those who define biblical historicity more narrowly. But Goldingay’s formulation is useful because it refuses an unnecessarily crude alternative: either every detail functions as literal reportage or Genesis makes no historical truth claims. His concern is to take seriously both the historical affirmations of Genesis and the literary form in which Scripture chooses to communicate them.

Where Goldingay is distinctive but less persuasive

Goldingay’s treatment of Genesis 3 is illuminating in many details, but I am less persuaded by the theological direction he takes when discussing the consequences of Adam and Eve’s rebellion. He rightly distinguishes what Genesis itself explicitly says from theological conclusions developed elsewhere in Scripture, and he acknowledges that Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 draw further implications from Adam’s disobedience. He also recognises that after Genesis 3 human sinfulness acquires a striking inevitability.

More debatable is his suggestion that the rebellion should be understood “in sociological rather than psychological terms”: it did not alter individual human makeup but fatally changed the environment into which subsequent humanity is born. This captures something important about the way sin becomes embedded in human relationships and societies, but as an overall account it seems too narrow. The wider canonical witness appears to say more than that humanity simply inherits a corrupted environment, even if the precise relationship between Adam’s sin, human solidarity, inherited corruption and personal guilt requires careful theological formulation.

I would therefore retain Goldingay’s exegetical caution—Genesis 3 should not automatically be made to say everything later Christian theology says about original sin—without necessarily following his own sociological formulation as far as he takes it. This is precisely where comparison is valuable: Goldingay exposes assumptions that deserve examination, but another commentator can help test whether his alternative adequately accounts for the rest of Scripture.

Something similar applies to his description of Genesis 1–11 as “historical parable.” The category is helpful in breaking the false choice between flat modern reportage and pure fiction. But it does not by itself tell us which elements of an individual narrative should be understood as historical description, symbolic representation or literary shaping. Goldingay is often content to leave that boundary open. Readers may regard that restraint as a strength, but when the historical question itself matters, the commentary sometimes clarifies the options more effectively than it resolves them.

Where I would begin

If I were sampling Goldingay rather than reading the commentary consecutively, I would begin with Genesis 16, 22, 45 and 50. Genesis 16 displays his sensitivity to narrative perspective and to characters who can disappear behind the main patriarchal story. Genesis 22 shows his willingness to preserve the force of difficult theological language such as “now I know” without simply denying divine foreknowledge. Genesis 45 and 50 contain what I regard as one of his strongest contributions: a sustained attempt to hold together genuine human intention, moral responsibility and prior divine purpose without reducing providence either to permission or to puppetry.

After those passages, I would turn to his treatment of Genesis 1–3. I am less persuaded by some of his conclusions there, but that is partly why the material is worth reading: Goldingay repeatedly exposes assumptions that readers may have brought to familiar texts without noticing them.

Bottom line

Goldingay’s greatest strength in Genesis is not novelty for novelty’s sake. It is his ability to notice unresolved tensions in the narrative and resist resolving them prematurely. His readings of Hagar, Abraham’s test and Joseph’s providence are especially rewarding because the originality serves the text: it makes familiar passages disclose features that are easy to miss and remains useful even when another commentator ultimately persuades more.

I would carry away three insights in particular: Hagar is treated by God as a theological subject rather than merely a vehicle for Abraham’s promise; “now I know” in Genesis 22 deserves to retain genuine force without requiring a denial of divine foreknowledge; and the Joseph story presents divine and human intention as simultaneously real without explaining away the mystery of their concurrence. Those are the kinds of distinctive readings for which Goldingay is especially worth consulting.

His more adventurous proposals—particularly his sociological formulation of the consequences of Adam’s rebellion and the somewhat open boundaries of his “historical parable” category—are better read alongside other strong Genesis commentators. But even there, disagreement can be productive. Goldingay often succeeds in making the reader see precisely where the real interpretive question lies.