If God can write on a wall, why can’t he write his own Bible?

Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote.
— Daniel 5:5

According to Daniel chapter 5, God wrote the words “mene, mene, tekel, parsin” on King Belshazzar’s palace wall. The prophet Daniel was (naturally) the only one who could translate the message, but the translation interests me far less than the fact that God could write!

What I mean is, there were obviously no laws or restrictions preventing God from physically writing his own messages, in fact, this wasn’t even the first time God had written something down.

The Lord said to Moses, “Chisel out two stone tablets like the first ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke.”
— Exodus 34:1

But if writing is not against the rules, then why didn’t God author his own book? Just give that floating hand a pen and let him go to work!

Imagine all the time the Jews would’ve saved by not having to second-guess which prophets were actually speaking for God! They wouldn’t even need to test the words of these prophets against their prophecies, since the messages were dictated by God himself (assuming they saw him write it). They’d just be like, “Hey, God wrote it, and therefore we know it’s true! If you don’t like it, talk to the hand!”

And if God wanted, he could’ve made his hand appear in every nation, delivering his word in every language.

And even today, God’s hand could appear in churches every Sunday, delivering new messages to churches across the globe.

I’m sure if we tried, we could come up with some legitimate-sounding reasons for why God prefers to use ghost writers (holy ghost writers?) to deliver his messages, rather than writing them personally. But no matter the excuse, the problem that always arises is that so many men claim to speak for God (or other deities): from the prophets of Baal, to the prophet of Ahura Mazda (Zoroaster), to the prophet Mohammad, to the Pope, to the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, to Pat Robertson and Benny Hinn, to many modern UFO/Alien prophets.

With so many claiming to speak for deities, it leads to a lot of confusion. Many of these men must be wrong, yet billions have followed them because these followers were unable to distinguish between real prophets (assuming they exist) and fake ones. Did God not anticipate this problem?

Consider the new book God Consciousness. According to its publisher, it was written by none other than God himself! While God didn’t physically write the book, it’s said he did telepathically dictate the book word-for-word to Robert William Farmilo. Why isn’t every Christian clamoring to get a copy of God’s latest book? Because prophets are a dime a dozen. When everyone speaks for God, no one does (i.e. no one takes these claims too seriously).

Anyway, if a message were to come from a real god, it would be nice if they actually delivered it personally, rather than sending one of their eccentric (and seemingly self-appointed) representatives. Doing so would help to eliminate a lot of confusion.

So it’s unfortunate that the “real” God should choose to use the same basic delivery method as all the false gods, especially when he’s perfectly capable of writing for himself.

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Conclusion

We know that people will arise who claim to speak for gods, and we know that many of them must be mistaken. We also know that false gods cannot speak for themselves, because they do not exist, and so it’s reasonable to assume that ideas about who these gods are and what they want are borne from the minds of ordinary men.

In light of these observations, is it really far-fetched to assume that the same thing could’ve happened with the God of the Bible? Does it really make sense that God would want to use the same delivery method as false gods? Or does God use the same delivery method for the same reason? Because he too is imaginary?

“But wait!” says the believer in my head, “Didn’t God go the extra mile to distinguish his messages from false gods? Through signs like miracles, prophecies, and the person of Jesus?” While I don’t want to detract from the original question, yes, this is what is claimed. I will endeavor to explore these other proofs, but this still doesn’t explain why God didn’t just write his own book in the first place, in addition to doing these other things.