We recognize the names, beginning with Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel. Their mythic lives and the commentaries about them are bedrock elements of Western civilization. But what if we relinquished the hal¬lowed ground of perceived wisdom and considered Martin Buber's instruction, presented as an epigraph to this book, to approach the text as something new, letting the words of the Book of Genesis reach us? Could we encounter the sacred heart of these mysterious stories as if for the first time?