I suppose the secularists are concerned that if it's right about the history, it just might be right about other things too . . .
I wholeheartedly agree. The stuff in the OT that is frankly historical, such as rulers, battles, fall of cities, would be obvious places to start in building synchronisms with ancient contemporary chronicles.
That has worked best with the Assyrian timeline, and to some extent the Babylonian, but most of the events in any one source pertain to the local stuff, or in the case of the wide-ranging Assyrians, to yet another place in some other direction and sometimes at great distances.
During the 19th century there began systematic and systemic efforts to undermine the Divine Right of Kings, and of course the most direct way to do that was to drop-kick the Bible. At best, that’s a baby-with-the-bath-water move. The other impediment to finding accurate synchronisms was the screwy things that were done vis a vis the chronology (or as I like to call it, pseudochronology) of the Egyptian New Kingdom, which has been a neck anchor for the ancient history of the eastern Mediterranean in general.
The synchronism problems were more than 90 percent solved in 1945:
http://www.varchive.org/ce/theses.htm
sidebars:
http://www.varchive.org/ce/joseph.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/hammurabi.html
Here’s what is nuts to me. The majority of the stories in the Old Testament aren’t especially religious. Many of them are simply historical tales of kings, battles, enemies and the wanderings of a Middle Eastern tribe.
The skeptics and secularists worry that if a proof of David slaying Goliath could be proved, for example, that it would also mean that the religious theme of the chosen people with a special relationship to a one true God would also be proved.
It’s pretty easy to see how a series of plagues and an escape from Egypt, the most powerful nation on earth, could be interpreted by the Jews as divine intervention on their behalf. But there are explanations for the plagues which have nothing to do with the supernatural and the exodus could simply be a great escape through dangerous but knowable terrain.
New Testament stories are much more religious in tone and meaning, requiring faith for their acceptance.