Faith and Retribution in "Genesis" and Homer's "Odyssey"

Both the Old Testament of the Bible and Homer's Odyssey posit a natural order that existed at the beginning, a time when everyone knew their place, man was in concord with God (or the gods), and everything was just as it should be, In the Bible, this was the time when Adam and Eve first lived in the Garden of Eden, before the Fall; in the Odyssey, it can be presumed to be the era …

…Flood story in the book of Genesis, we find the people of the earth building the idolatrous tower of Babel, showing that God's plan to permanently reform the errant nature of mankind did not work. Both stories show that the maintaining of the status quo is not a one-time event, but something that will require constant vigilance and faith. Works Cited: The Bible. KJV Homer. The Odyssey. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald. (New York : Vintage Classics, 1990).