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Signs that the sacred scriptures of the Jews and the Christians were written by God-sparked but fallible human beings begin at the beginning.
First, there are several related errors in calling it "The Good Book," starting with the use of the definite article. It is not the only good book and in conversation when one begins talking about it, it should be referred to with the indefinite article "a." It is a book among many others, not the only book. This is related to the related error of treating it as singular rather than plural. Again, there are many other good books. But, by itself, it is not a book — it is a whole library of books written by many authors and editors over centuries, in different genres, for different purposes, with different pretenses of being histories or factual accounts. At least the scriptures are forthcoming about that; the sets of chapters and verses like the collection of prophecies of Isaiah are treated as books within the book. Viz, "the Book of Genesis, chapter one, verse one."
Many of the included books are not original content; they often rework other stories. Genesis, in particular, borrows extensively from Mesopotamian myths. The account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis borrows from the myth of the struggle of Marduk with Tiamat. (Even the ways of referring to the primordial chaos — the Hebrew term תְהוֹם, 't'hôm,' glossed as "the deep," and the Akkadian term for Tiamat, 𒀭𒋾𒊩𒆳, are cognates.) The second story of creation in the following chapters of Genesis borrows from the legend of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. And the Flood narrative in Genesis, chapters six through nine borrows from another part of the legend of Gilgamesh.
This was not plagiarism; the stories they borrowed would have been familiar to the audience and be experienced like a film making allusions to other films or musicians riffing on or making covers of other music.
If "Good" is taken to mean that the bible should be considered a model of moral conduct, it is far from that. Consider the story of Jacob and his children in Genesis, chapter 34. Because his sons claimed that their sister had been defiled, they insisted that all of the Shechemite men get circumcised before they would allow the son of the ruler Hamor to marry their sister, Dinah. Then, when the men were recovering from the painful severing of their foreskins, Jacob's sons, led by Simeon and Levi, murdered all the Shechemite men, looted the city, stole all the livestock, and carried off all of the Shechemite women and children into slavery. And Jacob did not condemn their acts as immoral but instead worried 'What will the neighbors think?' And there are many other such stories involving bad behavior by patriarchs and Yahweh alike.
And the book itself is filled with errors. There are typos such as occasionally spelling the name Nebuchadnezzar (with an “n”) as Nebuchadrezzar (with an “r”). There are inconsistent versions of the same story, like the mutually contradictory creation myths in Genesis, chapters one and two, or the tangling and interweaving of alternative versions of the Flood in Genesis chapters six to nine. And the Books of Kings and Chronicles present conflicting versions of the same history.
But the most important error comes in the very first chapter and verse and runs through the entire collection of scriptures: בְּרֵאשִׁית, בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים, אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם, וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ. 'In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.' This implies that the creator is distinct from the creation instead of both being different ways of looking at the same infinite and eternal essence. God and Nature are One.
The scriptures never claim to be the literal infallible word of God and should not be read as such.
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