Feiler says of writing the book:  "I had an idea.  What if I retraced the Bible through the desert and read the stories along the way?  What if I went to sites where the stories occurred and tried to figure out whether the events could be proven?  What if I entered the stories as if they were alive and tried to become a part of them?  What if I walked the Bible?"

He discovered that in the Middle East the Bible is not an abstraction but an ongoing narrative:  "stories that begin in the sand, get entrenched in stone, pass down through families, and play themselves out in the residents and visitors who traverse its lines nearly five thousand years after they were first etched into memory."  Feiler approaches these ancient stories with what he calls contemporary methods of learning: traveling, talking, experiencing.  And through his journey, he begins to understand why these stories have become so timeless and so important to so many people.

Feiler was accompanied on his quest by Avner Goren, an archaeologist and biblical historian, who is one of Israel's most eloquent spokesmen on life in the ancient world.  With no archaeological evidence to tie any of the events in the Five Books to specific places, they were left to wade through what Feiler calls "the often-contradictory claims of history, myth, legend, archaeobiology, paleozoology, and faith" to place the biblical stories in the historical and cultural context of the Middle East.

This is not a weighty tome but an adventure story enhanced by the scavenger-hunt feel of the journey of two men who are having fun as they tie the biblical stories to the land they are traversing.