A practical definition for "God"

[robvalue]

The Old Testament is a story. When one part of a story builds up to another part of a story, it's called storytelling. It's really not very surprising, it happens in most stories.

As for why people might make things up:

To start a cult
To get respect and power
To write a story
As a joke
They were deluded
They were forced to write it
... and so on.

There's plenty of perfectly normal reasons for people to make things up. People do it all the time. Every one of those reasons is infinitely more plausible than a bunch of magic stuff actually happened. You would defer to one of those reasons for any story every written other than the bible, I would expect.

I know you're not interested in any of that so I'll leave it there.