For as long as there have been stories, there have been those who asked, “Did that really happen, or are you just making it up?” In the last 150 years or so, the debate over whether Genesis or science is telling the better truth has heated up dramatically. Did God create the world in six days? Were Adam and Eve actual, historical figures? Personally, I believe Adam and Eve indeed once walked the earth as living beings. As for the creation—I believe rather that it took God six days to tell the story of the billions of years he spent tending his garden of galaxies.

But Genesis continues beyond the first few controversial chapters to other, obscurer stories. This book is my imaginative attempt to retell those stories, stripping away some of the age-old lies with new ones of my own, in order to ferret out the deepest, most obvious truths of the Bible: that we are but seeds, whose deaths will bring new life a thousandfold into this fallen world, the moreso the more willingly we die.

How wrong am I? Find out for yourself what lies at the heart of Genesis.