The World of the Greek Heroes

The Greek heroic world is already a world of distinct peoples. Homer gives us named cities, ruling houses, traveling warriors, and communities whose relationships matter to the war. Genealogies carry histories of descent within that differentiated landscape.

This makes the heroic setting difficult to place in an undivided humanity before languages, nations, and political identities. Within the book's proposed biblical framework, it belongs more naturally after the dispersion associated with Babel.

The placement is provisional. A literary world containing cities and languages does not establish a date for Babel or prove that a Greek storyteller knew that biblical event. It shows the kind of human setting the stories assume.

That distinction prepares the next question. If heroic tradition belongs to a world of nations, how might it relate to biblical passages that associate nations with heavenly powers? Those passages describe a different kind of supernatural involvement from the unions in Genesis 6.