This book, first published in 1990, summarizes and evaluates the contribution of Martin Buber as a theorist of myth. Buber provides explicit guidelines for understanding and evaluating myths. He describes reality as twofold: people live either in a world of things, to which they relate as a subject controlling its objects, or in a world of self-conscious others, with whom one relates as fellow subjects. Human beings require both types of reality, but also a means of moving from one to the other. Buber understands myths as one such means by which people pass from I-It reality to I-You meeting. In studying myths, he focuses on the myths in the traditions he knows best, but offers his advice and interpretation of mythology and scholarship about mythology generally.

1. The Student of Myth 2. Buber's View of Myth 3. Buber and the Bible 4. The Meaning of Eden 5. The Exodus 6. Buber and Hasidic Myth 7. Myth as Language 8. Hasidism and Modernity 9. Evaluating Buber