Why the phrase "thunder and lightning", and not "lightning and thunder"?

In the Latin bible, it is written in Exodus 19:16-25:

iam advenerat tertius dies et mane inclaruerat et ecce coeperunt audiri tonitrua ac micare fulgura et nubes densissima operire montem clangorque bucinae vehementius perstrepebat timuit populus qui erat in castris.

A widespread translation in the English Bible is:

On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, with a thick cloud over the mountain, and a very loud trumpet blast. Everyone in the camp trembled

The literal translation of "audiri tonitrua ac micare fulgura" is "hear thunder and see lightning" in this precise (chronologically erroneous) order. We may imagine that today expression thunder and lightning is related to this bible sentence.

EDIT: The whole New Testament was initially written in Greek, whilst the vast majority of the Old Testament was written in Hebrew. Exodus being a part of the Old Testament, the origin of the text is probably Hebrew. The Hebraic Bible was translated to Greek in the 3rd century BC. The first translation from Greek to Latin was the Vulgate by St. Jerome at end of the 4th century AD.

To complete the answer, let's add @Mike's pertinent finding:

It was "thunders and lightnings" in the original Hebrew, too. See: Hebrew-English Exodus translation. "kolot u'vrakim". "Kolot" is thunder (feminine plural) and "vrakim" is lightning (masculine plural).

To the preceding answers I would add that between thunder and lightning, the thunder is the more substantial.

• Lightning is line-of-sight, decreases substantially with reflection, and can be completely obscured by clouds, forest canopy, your roof, etc. Thunder carries long distances, around corners, and penetrates most obstacles.
• Lightning is perceived visibly whereas thunder is both heard and felt. Thunder can rattle your house. It is the more visceral of the two.
• Lightning is instantaneous whereas thunder has stamina. It can roll on, reverberate, echo, and outlast the visible lightning by many seconds.

These generalizations hold true unless of course the lightning strikes you or close to you. However, that occurrence is extremely rare in comparison. It's very common to feel vibrations of thunder, much less so to feel lightning. Thankfully.

Although a previous answer quotes from the Bible as a possible source of this word pattern, the differential in how these are experienced may account for the ordering of the phrase in the bible and elsewhere rather than it being happenstance.

Update 15 Sep 2015
Thanks to a downvote on this answer, other responses, and subsequent discussion in the comments, I was inspired to so a little research on this and learned a lot. The most helpful document I found was The Chicken or the Egg? A Probabilistic Analysis of English Binomials by Benor and Levy which was most enlightening:

Based on an analysis of 692 binomial tokens from on-line corpora, we show that a number of semantic, metrical, and frequency constraints contribute significantly to ordering preferences, overshadowing the phonological factors that have traditionally been considered important.

Cutting to the summary of the study, the authors write:

The main trend we found in our data was the prominence of semantic over metrical constraints, and metrical over frequency constraints. We expect that a similar relationship might be found among these different levels of grammar in phenomena other than binomial formation where semantic, phonological, and frequency factors are also relevant.

The semantic constraints mentioned are precedence hierarchies based on meanings of the terms in the binomial. Constraints based on how the words are formed in the mouth and "roll off the tongue," or how they sound, are valid as well but in no way are mutually exclusive to semantic precedence.

Amusingly, the explanation for the downvote on this answer (and my motivation to take time out for the Internet searching) was the assertion that my response above is merely a theory and an assertion that the ordering was based on "how the words scan" is a fact. The scholarly research I discovered seems to indicate that there are many competing theories of binomial construction which successfully predict binomial formation at high rates, and which appear to contribute to a complex hierarchical web of interacting causes. Although "scanning" was not mentioned by that name, multiple theories are based on the vocalization and sound of the words. Then too, several are based on factors such as those mentioned in this answer (how and how often terms A and B are experienced) and also successfully predict fixed binomials with high rates of success.

According to the research I found, all of the competing theories are just that - theories - and none considered definitive, much less fact. When the most authoritative research available is theories, presumably any "best" answer would be a theory. When the research indicates an interdependent hierarchical web of causality, presumably any "best" answer would be based on one or more of them. What seems to have emerged is several answers converging on "rightness" and which in aggregate appear to provide a mosaic of understanding, somewhat resembling the hierarchical causality web the authors in the cited paper describe.

Though I barely had time for a cursory scan, I got the impression that any answer to this question claiming to be fact or claiming that any one of the competing causality theories is dominant to the exclusion of all others would necessarily be deficient.

Much thanks to the downvoter for the motivation to do the searching and Mari-Lou A for the pointer to irreversible binomials which made the search productive. I see some other answers were downvoted for being equally "wrong." Happy to be in such good company.

At some stage in their scientific analysis of the phenomena of lightning and thunder, people may have believed that thunder came first and that lighting emerged out of it. From a discussion of thunder and lightning as meteors "of mixt kinde" in John Gwillim, A Display of Heraldrie (1611):

Thunder is an inflamed Exhalation, which by his powerfull force breaketh thorow the Clouds violentlie, with great noise and terrour. The forcible power thereof is rather apprehended by the eare, then subiected to the sight : neuerthelesse, the ancient times haue deuised a certaine imaginarie forme wherby they would expresse the forcible power thereof, as also of the lightning.

Lightning is a vehement eruption of an inflamed exhalation, proceeding from Thunder ; which though it is in time after Thunder, yet it is first represented to our senses, by reason that our sight is farre more subtill and apprehensiue then is our hearing. And in regard that Thunder and Lightning doe both proceed from one selfe-cause, they haue in such their imaginarie fiction conioined them both vnder one forme, after this manner.

In Hall's view, thunder comes first, as being the name of the "inflamed Exhalation" that violently forces apart the clouds, whereas lightning is the vehement eruption of this exhalation, later in time but earlier in human perception due to the superior subtlety of our sight over our hearing.

The OED (1971 edition) offers this definition as 1(b) for thunder:

b. Regarded as the destructive agent producing the effects usually attributed to the lightning; (with a and pl.) a thunderstroke or 'thunderbolt'. Now only poet. or rhet. ((exc. fig.).

That early English speakers did not think of thunder as being merely the sound that accompanies lightning may also be seen from the word thunderbolt, which the OED dates to 1440 and assigns the following first definition:

1. A supposed bolt or dart formerly (and still vulgarly) believed to be the destructive agent in a lightning-flash when it 'strikes' anything; a flash of lightning conceived as an intensely hot solid body moving rapidly through the air and impinging upon something; in mythology, an attribute of Jove, Thor, or other deity.

and again from the word thunderstroke, which the OED dates to 1587 and defines this way:

A stroke of 'thunder' (cf. THUNDER sb. 1 b); the impact of a lightning-flash.

For a lengthy (and quite confusing) discussion of various views of the ancients about thunder, lightning, and fulgurations, see the 1614 Thomas Lodge translation of The Workes Both Morall and Natural of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, chapters 11 through 35 of the second book of Seneca's Of Naturall Questions.

In any event, I suspect that the precise wording "thunder and lightning" became a commonplace pairing in English (the phrase appears, in that order, in plays by Nashe, Marlowe, and Jonson, for example, and in stage directions in two of Shakespare's plays, Julius Caesar and Henry the Sixth, Part II) at a time when the natural phenomena of thunder and of lightning were understood quite differently from the way they are today, with thunder having (by some accounts, at least) the greater and earlier role in the combination.

Most academic research on binomials which have frozen would seem to focus around the scan of the phrase.

In short it "sounds better" (i.e., is easier to say, more punchy, et cetera) one way than the other.

(The academic thought on the matter seems to discuss the detailed intricacies of why a pair scans better one way or another: so, where any lyricist might say of a pair "of course it scans better this way than the other way..." the academic literature seems to investigate the "why" of that in detail.)

Here's a very worthwhile survey article

A basic in thought about the scan of binomials, if we care about previous thinking on the matter, would seem to be that the "shorter" scanning word goes first...

In asking about the binomial "frozen" nature of thunder and lightning, it's difficult to see why one wouldn't first, instantly, look at that aspect: since thunder and lightning is a perfect example of it with the "shorter" scan word going first.

Note that this answer previously included some irrelevant survey material, such as a list of musical and poetic uses of the binomial in question. Useless and confusing so redacted.