I suggest your question Fulltimestudent,
leads to a vital conclusion as to why the Bible was written!
The essential detail is that Israel was
ever historically a subordinate territory and a nation occupied by the prevailing dominant
powers, namely Egypt, Babylon and Assyria in succession. Israel remained a
backwater for centuries and was the land through which lay the highland route for
connecting between the great powers in the north and south. Normally, with
fortified garrisons and occupying troops at ten mile intervals or so along the way.
No people would celebrate its occupying forces, and to write things down was
like a divine edict so Israel would not want to record that indignity.
Israel (the worshippers of El the
father of Jehovah) are first mentioned about 1200 BCE. For some centuries the unproductive
highlands of central Canaan had been a refuge for the dispossessed from all
over the north of the Levant and Assyria. These were loose bands of refugees called
the Ebiru which seems to be the source of the word ‘Hebrew’ (recorded at least from 1500
BCE onwards).
Unlike the illustrious neighbours such
as the highly organised, wealthy, literate and tolerant Egyptians to the south
west or the Philistines to the south or the maritime traders the Phoenicians next door to the west;
Israel by contrast was very small potato. This is borne out by the archaeology.
The archaeology of Israel in the
British Museum correspondingly shows very little indigenous material other
than humble domestic ware intermittently over a long period. The two more interesting areas of
finds are the things left behind by the foreign occupiers or objects
copied from neighbouring lands. (Jehovah for example was seated idol in imitation of the Egyptian ones, with either an ox head or sometimes a human head with large cow horns). Having said that, the territory of modern Israel has a
fascinating archaeological record notable for its continuity stretching back from
early human and Neanderthal finds around 90,000 years bp (before present) right
the way through the rest of the Old Stone Age and into the New and then on into
the Bronze Age and later.
However the artefacts from native Israel before the early seventh century BCE tend towards
revealing a culturally and materially impoverished people and small in population number...don't believe what the Bible says on figures.
Perhaps
it is this very impoverishment and the political impotence of early Israel which drove the
people there to create the imaginative Biblical narrative towards the hyperbole
of power and military triumph? For certainly the dream of the
conquering king is a leitmotif.
It was the material poverty of Israel which I suggest led
to a literature of messianic hope and hence the enduring quality behind the success of the
Bible. Truth however has little to do with its content.