The impression I get isn't that the OT writers saw god as omni-anything. He was just the toughest bastard on the block. They seem to write about him as if he were a bully, who picks a nation for his own and either promises to kick their enemies' asses (if his chosen people are loyal) or promises to kick their asses (if they aren't loyal enough). But that seems to be the way it was at the time: with no actual gods showing up to do anything at all, a nation could attribute its victories to "our god was better than yours" or attribute its losses to "our god punished us for not worshiping him enough." Note that there was never a time when they were going to admit that "your god was the better god."
Over time the character is bound to become tougher because no one wants to walk back a positive claim. If a writer decided that Yahweh was powerful enough to lift two heavy boulders, then the next writer would have to tell the story of how he juggled three of them. And the next writer tells us that he juggled three of them while killing aliens with his laser-beam eyes. And so on. Before long he's omni-this and omni-that and the only ass he can't kick is his own, but only because he doesn't really want to.
Over time the character is bound to become tougher because no one wants to walk back a positive claim. If a writer decided that Yahweh was powerful enough to lift two heavy boulders, then the next writer would have to tell the story of how he juggled three of them. And the next writer tells us that he juggled three of them while killing aliens with his laser-beam eyes. And so on. Before long he's omni-this and omni-that and the only ass he can't kick is his own, but only because he doesn't really want to.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
