The show “The Naked Archeologist” features a Canadian Jewish guy exploring the mysteries of the Bible.
The Egyptians had a symbolic alphabet and used it sometimes phonetically. There are perhaps the earliest phonetic writing in the world in the area and estimated time Jews were in Egypt, and he theorizes Jews took the concept of writing and turned it purely into a phonetic system - and the earliest inscriptions in the Sinai are to the Hebrew / Aramaic gods.
I wholeheartedly agree. There's a pathology regarding the Old Testament as a history source, part of the overall and long-running campaign to rid the world of Judaism and at the same time undermine the Bible. A couple hundred years ago the latter move was going on in order to undermine the Divine Right of Kings. There are some conflicts between the versions (the Books of Samuel overlap a bit with Kings and Chronicles, and K & C overlap each other -- the familiar story of Samson appears as the story of Shamgar, for instance), but the historical stuff in the OT is the only contiguous account that exists for that time in the Middle East, the neighboring peoples either destroyed each other's archives, or they didn't keep them in a linear fashion, using the throne years of the consecutive (or overlapping) rulers instead.