“The biblical stories should thus be regarded as a national mythology with no more historical basis than the Homeric saga of Odysseus’s travels of Virgil’s saga of Aeneas’s founding of Rome (36—Searching for the Patriarchs).

We know that through archaeological research that camels were not domesticated as beasts of burden earlier than the late second millennium and were not widely used in that capacity in the ancient Near East until well after 1000 BCE.  And an even more telling detail—the camel caravan carrying “gum, balm, and myrrh.” In the Joseph story—reveals an obvious familiarity with the main products of the lucrative Arabian trade that flourished under the supervision of the Assyrian empire in the eighth-seventh centuries BCE (id. 37).

Then there is the issue of the Philistines.  We hear of them in connection with Isaac’s encounter with “Abimelech, king of the Philistines,” at the city of Gerar (Genesis 26:1).  The Philistines, a group of migrants from the Aegean or eastern Mediterranean, had not established their settlements along the coastal plain of Canaan until sometime after 1200 BCE.  Their cities prospered in the eleventh and tenth centuries and continued to dominate the area well into the Assyrian period {quite different than the Biblical account} (id. 37). 

All the clues point to a time of composition many centuries after the time in which the Bible reports the lives of the patriarchs took place.  These and other anachronisms suggest an intensive period of writing the patriarchal narratives in the eighth or seventh centuries (id. 38). 

Putting aside the possibility of divinely inspired miracles, one can hardly accept the idea of a flight of a large group of slaves from Egypt through the heavily guarded border fortifications into the desert and then into Canaan in the time of such a formidable Egyptian presence.  Any group escaping Egypt against the will of the pharaoh would have easily been tracked down not only by an Egyptian army chasing it from the delta but also by the Egyptian soldiers in the forts in northern Sinai and in Canaan (id. 61, Did the Exodus Happen). 

The conclusion—that the Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible—seems irrefutable when we examine the evidence at specific sites where the children of Israel were said to have camped for extended periods during their wandering in the desert…. Not even a single shred left by a tiny fleeing band of frightened refugees (id. 63).

Unfortunately for those seeking a historical Exodus, they were unoccupied precisely at the time whey reportedly played a role in the events of the wandering of the children of Israel in the wilderness (id. 64).

As with the Exodus story, archaeology has uncovered a dramatic discrepancy between the Bible and the situation within Canaan at the suggested date of the conquest, between 1230 and 1220 BCE (76, A Different Kind of Canaan).

It is highly unlikely that the Egyptian garrisons throughout the country would have remained on the sidelines as a group of refugees (from Egypt) wreaked havoc throughout the province of Canaan (id. 79).   

Only recently has the consensus finally abandoned the conquest story (id. 83). 

Biblical historians such as Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche of the University of Copenhagen and Philip Davies of the University of Sheffield dubbed “biblical minimalists’ by their detractors, have argued that David and Solomon, the united monarch of Israel, and indeed the entire biblical description of the history of Israel are no more than elaborate, skillful ideological constructs produced by priestly circles in Jerusalem in post-exilic or even Hellenistic times (128, Did David and Solomon Exist?)