No, not like that.
I have been surprised, and pleased, that an excellent diary by Secular School Teacher has stayed on the rec list for a few days. That diary provides a good summary of the work of Israel Finkelstein, a prominent Israeli archaeologist, unofficial leader of a group sometimes called "the Tal Aviv Mafia."
Jump for more explanation.
When read out of context some of the work of Finkelstein and others in this group can sound rather harsh in comparison to other academic arguments. An awareness of the kind of resistance they encounter from "traditionalist" views that rely almost entirely on assumptions, rather than evidence and argumentation, provides a context in which this aspect of their work makes more sense.
For those who do not know, I am a scholar in the area of Hebrew Scriptures, but more of the literary type. Therefore, the archaeology of the Ancient Near East is a side-interest of mine. I make some use of the conclusions that come from this field, but I do not do original research in this area.
The reason for my title is that those of us who work with the biblical literature using historically-informed literary approaches can and have arrived at similar conclusions to Finkelstein's, in terms of understanding what the Bible is doing. See for example Jacob L. Wright's King David's Reign Revisited. According to Wright, the stories of King Saul and King David were originally independent. Putting them together was the art of the writer of the book(s) called I and II Samuel, who sought to produce a unified story for Israel and present an argument about how they should understand their past. The end of the story told by the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament becomes complicated because the Jewish people are moving along divergent paths, some in Palestine, some in Egypt, some in Persia, etc. Those in the Diaspora needed different kids of texts than those living in the homeland. I have tried to describe some of this complex theological development in one of my own books, Portraits of a Mature God: Choices in Old Testament Theology.
In simplest terms, what the writers of the Bible were doing was building a national story. To do this they used bits and pieces of local and regional material that were in oral or written form. Some of those individual pieces undoubtedly have connections to events that happened outside of the text, but those connections are largely lost, and they are not really the main point, except for fundamentalist readers, for whom the precise connection to outside events is a major part of what makes the stories "true." What makes poems like those in the book of Psalms "true" for these readers is that David wrote them all.
For many Israelites at the time the biblical books were written, even the stories that reflected events outside the text were as much of their actual past as the Mayflower and the pilgrims are apart of the past of an American like me whose relatives came from Scotland in the nineteenth century.
The national story of Israel in the biblical literature is heavily negotiated, and the marks of that negotiation are embedded in the text at many points. Talking about it in terms of our modern library/bookstore divisions of "fiction" "non-fiction" makes no sense. The reasons for writing each of the components developed by Finkelstein are well summarized in the previous diary. I would have some quibbles with some of them, but they are all generally reasonable. They are the kinds of conclusions one could produce from an examination of the literature alone. Their failure to match archaeological evidence is consistent with, and in that sense "proves" for many of us, that the Bible is what what thought it was, a constructed national story intended to provide a common identity to a diverse group of people who had suffered a long series traumas. It became the foundation for continuing developments of sacred literature in the branches of Israelite religion that became Judaism and Christianity.