It seems to me that over the ages, inexplicable happenings were put down to "The Gods" because surely (by their thinking) no one thing could be "controlled by a single entity so there had to be a "god" for each thing? Like A god for thunder, a god for rain and so on.

When a catastrophe struck, that god was "angry" and had to be placated somehow and over time, that god had to be respected to prevent it getting angry again? So it was that all the gods had to be respected to save the populace retribution?

Things swanned along like that until along comes this bloke called Moses about 3,300 years ago. By that time, writing had been "invented"  so at times, Moses wrote things down, then made "speeches" about it, at other times, he came out with new things during an oratory then wrote it down (well, as he remembered it) afterwards. He re-hashed some of the old sayings and brought out his version of what came to be known as Genesis. Sooooo, there's been a bit of editing and some additions made?

Moses fancied a bit of time on his own so trekked off up a mountain to talk to himself and while there, forty nine gates of wisdom are opened for him so after being there for forty days learning all this new stuff he writes it all down and comes back to tell everyone how to go on in the future?

However, because Moses had been gone so long, the people had resorted to the "old" ways and made themselves a Golden Calf to worship? Ah-ha, so animals (or representations of them) were just some of the things that were revered even at that time (3,300 years ago).

On and off during the next 39 years, Moses is up and down the mountain and writes down what he's been told by God..... Again, sometimes he preached what he'd written down, sometimes he preached and then wrote it down.....

Note carefully, God didn't write anything down. Why not? If he had created the Universe along with the World where we now live, surely he could have written it down himself instead of passing it on to a mere mortal to forget bits, add bits and edit at will?

Now these prophecies... none of them predict such things as transistors, integrated circuits, those strange things where people appear in a little picture frame and talk to you (!!the haunted fish tank! mobile phones!!) or that you could take a bit of stuff out of the ground and hurl it together in such a way as to create a chain-reaction which flattens a huge area and kills thousand of people in one blinding flash?

Those prophets only "predicted" (???) things they could get their heads round of at the time?

We'll leave it there for now eh? Leave room for comments?