
I am reading a book at present called " Why Homer Matters"  and as the title implies It's about the two great epic poems of the ancient world, the Iliad and he Odyssey.  The book looks at those poems in a new way, seeing them not as the work of one man, but as the product of several hands, put together first in an oral tradition and then on paper.  
The story of the rape of Helen, the bloody ten year siege of Troy and the city's eventual capture and destruction ; and then the long homeward journey of Odysseus is set in the Bronze Age and is a fascinating effort to disentangle myth from reality.  The author, Adam Nicholson, sees the poems as describing the clash first between a warrior led civilisation, land based and nomadic, often violent, and based in the steppes of Asia with flocks and herds, and on the other hand  the thriving urban culture of Troy with its art and architecture. 
The sea is ever present too in the Odyssey, wine dark and brooding,  dangerous, full of monsters etc.   Then the author looks at the archeology of the period and finds a great deal in common across a wide geographical area,  The design of the weaponry and artefacts of the Bronze Age have been found as far west as Ireland, way beyond he Mediterranean and the Straights of Gibraltar  -  the so called Pillars of Hercules -  and to the East on the borders of what we know today as China.  
Fascinating look at myth and reality.
Our OT reading today from Genesis has some similarities in that it mingles myth and reality.   The first twelve chapters are set in a world of serpents that speak, of giants. Towers of Babel, Floods and arks and of characters who live for hundreds of years.  Those chapters read to me like an explanation, written half a millennium after the events they describe, of what life was for and how it came about. The eternal questions answered first in oral tradition. 
We open with a bang the creation in 6 days and move rapidly from the Garden of Eden to building with bricks and a city.  On the way we meet Noah and his ark Noah. He dies at 950 and we move through generations - the begats- until suddenly we are there with real people, in Ur of the Chaldees with  Abram and his flocks. God's covenant with him. 

