The title itself represents the mysteries of the origins of the Jewish People, their endurance and their unique place in the history of humankind. The book opens with a reflection on the nature of humans, and how story telling is both intrinsic to and essential for our species; and what follows is how the Jews formed as a people, were first identified archeologically as such in the monuments of Egyptian pharaohs, and how they cohered tightly by telling their story from generation to generation. How although storytelling bound the people, they faced internal discord and faced grave external challenge, even exile and worse, during their first two millennia, and how in their second two millennia they endured as mostly unwanted and oppressed, sometimes brutalized guests of others, without losing their peoplehood. How they created ways to maintain their faith through a unique portable scroll called the Torah and later houses of study and worship wherever they were. How over four millennia adversaries claimed to have destroyed not only them but their God, but unexpected and improbable benefactors came to their aid. How the Promised Land was always part of their story, from hope, to fact, to dreams and finally back to fact. How the Jews' core origin belief in ethical monotheism came to be the faith of more than half the people on earth. This is a story of mysteries, tragedies, wonders and miracles. Not told as a sermon or a polemic but just as a story.
