This chapter takes a close look at the Homeric phrase ‘hand of god’, used in the Iliad in connection with a divinely ordained plague. While past scholarship has identified this phrase as a straightforwardly Near Eastern idiom, on the basis of analogies in several Semitic languages, the author broadens the horizon by juxtaposing Near Eastern and Indo-European perspectives, and, in a linguistic analogy to the literary studies of Lardinois and Ballesteros Petrella (also in this volume), devotes special attention to the context of the phrase within the Greek epic-formulaic system. The author is sceptical of the explanatory value of the Near Eastern parallels in this particular instance.