Is God really a volcano

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, when you strip this particular mythology bare of embellishment (embellishment isn't exactly difficult to explain, we tell stories about "big fish" incessently) you aren't left holding anything revolutionary. You have an anthropomorphic concept of "forces" and a notion of an "otherworld", combined with a longing for a specific set of societal circumstances. We seem so hardwired to deal with other human beings that we have a definite tendency towards treating almost everything in existence like a human being in one way or another. We get angry at inanimate objects and we externalize and personify notions like "luck" and "fate". Giving the cosmos itself (or even some part of it) a human face is the essence of what it means to manufacture a deity. We've been doing this for quite some time. Otherworlds are also fairly common in the human experience, even amongst those who have no religious beliefs. We all dream, we all imagine and wonder and fantasize. We all have memories, and we all suffer loss. Otherworlds and burial rites seem to be the very first expressions of spirituality that leave concrete evidence. The last bit is where I would diverge from your asessment. The OT narrative is very much about promoting a specific societal standard or situation. This is not the business of a primitive culture. Primitive in comparison to ourselves, sure, but not primitive with regards to their placement in time honestly. A small tribe of uncivilized people rarely requires a set guideline, we seem to be capable of dealing with issues individually and as they arise as long as our group is small enough. You only need to codify societal norms when the society becomes too large to grease on an individual level. God has been leveraged to explain a great many things, or pigeonholed into a great many urges. We see the authors desire for retribution, deliverance, and prosperity in the OT God.

Now, as I said, these are all generalities. The thing is, that when you consider all of these collective urges and motivations that are very well demonstrated in our species, you hardly require a single explanation as to what "caused" the Yahweh narrative. While it is definitely it's own deity the common trends of what and how gods are used are present in every case, and better attributed to ourselves than any external antagonist/protagonist, let alone a some immensely powerful cosmic entity (or even an immensely powerful physical object..such as a volcano). That these urges would take on a decidedly regional flavor is also far less than surprising. The people who authored the Yahweh myth didn't really require any external initiator beyond what was already present, and most of what is required for this sort of narrative is internal and relatively common to the human experience overall. The groundwork for all of this had been laid literally a hundred thousand years before the first words of the OT were ever spoken. Asking "what happened to us to make us believe this" is expressing exactly the same drive that the authors were expressing. Trying to explain things as "what [insert action here] -to us-". When it comes to gods, it seems to be much more accurate to consider ourselves the happening. We happened to us, that's why we believe.