Yep, you got it right, the ultimate Alphas, the Gods, want the mortals to raise their progeny, because they’re so important they don’t have time to do it themselves.
The obvious example is Joseph and Jesus. But it is not the only one.
Buddha too, was not born of his father, even if he did eventually leave his wife and kid to be raised by him.
Muhammad, as far as I know was not of this type of birth, but he was orphaned and raised by his uncle.
There are stories of Zoroaster being immaculately conceived.
Zeus. Well, the list is a long one of all the mortal women he had children with, many of them married, not the least was Hercules, born to Alchmene, the wife of Amphitryon whom “she honored above all others.” Apparently bearing another’s son is an honor.
Often the women either had no choice, or were tricked into having the child (such was the birth of King Arthur brought about). The idea that women are not complicit in the cuckoldry of their men is typical of these stories. The image of women as innocent victims is old, older that western civilization perhaps.
If you look at almost every religious tradition, there are fathers raising children that are not their own. Why is this?
Usually the orphan story is looked at from the perspective of the child. Everyone wishes they were born of greater parents, that secretly they were the children of Krypton instead of the ordinary offspring of ma and pa Kent. Or their parents were wizards, instead of the beastly Dursley’s. But there is more to it than that.
It is rare to have a mother raising a child not her own although the stories exist and the motif is often the “evil step mother.”
But the men that raise children that are not their own are often viewed as paragons of fatherhood. They are good fathers, perhaps the best fathers a child could hope for under the circumstances.
In order for societies to survive, in order for civilization to succeed, men must see their investment in children as valuable. The idea that the child does not have to be their biological one is a message that has been pushed, and the question is why. The answer is in the question.
There has always been cuckoldry. There have always been doubts about parentage. To assuage these doubts, these stories exist to shame and push men to be fathers, despite these doubts. To place value in the act of parenting, even when the child is not theirs.
It is good to remember that although society and civilization was built by men, that society and civilization are not for individual men. They never have been.
