Plato is not prepared to rewrite the Hellenic Bible: he will only draw up the canons which the poets must follow. It is to be noticed that these canons are peculiar, and would exclude not merely most of Homer and Hesiod, but a large part of the Old and some of the New Testament. The first canon is that God, being good, cannot be the cause or originator of any harm or evil to mankind; for these things some other cause must be discovered. The greater part of the human lot is evil: so God is not the cause of the majority of human events.
This excludes Homer’s lines:
Two butts of human fortunes by the gates of Heaven stood,
One full of all things evil, and one of all things good.
To whom God gives a mixture, his life is weal and woe,
But to whom He gives of the evil alone, he lives as a beggar below.
And
Zeus is the world’s housekeeper, who serves out weal and woe.
And Aeschylus’
God plants the seed of sin among mankind,