What do Atheists believe the Bible as?

[Minimalist]

Take your time to read it.

I've seen it all before and it is the same silly pseudo-scientific shit as before. You take 1,000 years of Egyptian history and look for an anomaly and then say Yep - THERE THEY ARE!!! THERE ARE THE FUCKING JEWS!!!!

Sorry, boy. History doesn't work that way. All of the mental masturbation used by people like Hershel Shanks ( who is not an archaeologist....he is a lawyer who runs a magazine selling salvation to gullible shitheads) goes away when you understand that the initial drafts of what later came to be the OT were not written until the 7th century BC and were then heavily edited in succeeding centuries.

They Hyksos were Canaanites...probably originally came as either a mercenary unit hired by the Egyptians ( most likely ) or as refugees from one of the periodic droughts in Canaan ( less likely.) When the Middle Kingdom collapsed in political disarray the Hyksos were uniquely situated to set themselves up as a dynasty in the northern part of Egypt. They do not seem to have ever controlled the whole country which led to the rise of competing dynasties in the south. Eventually, the founder of the 18th dynasty ( Ahmose I... look closely at that name, btw) drove them out of Egypt, pursued them back to Canaan and crushed them. In the process he set up a 4 century Egyptian hegemony over Canaan which only ended in the mid- 12th century BCE. Canaanites were not "Jewish" however.

As far as the alleged "Conquest" goes, modern archaeology has dismissed the fanciful notions of any blood-thirsty bastard named "Joshua." There are destruction layers at many sites, scattered over a two hundred year period and a number of the sites which "Joshua" conquered did not even exist in the Late Bronze Age. As William Dever wryly pointed out, "the big miracle of Joshua was that he conquered cities that weren't even there."

Which ( dismissing the literature of Sinuhe for being "literature" and which has nothing the fuck to do with Jews, anyway) brings us to the Merneptah stele which I am going to guess you have never read beyond the one line which gives you a hard on because you think it says what you want it to say.

Here is a full translation - 150 lines of bombastic bullshit.

http://bibledudes.com/biblical-studies/f...lation.php

The pharaoh, the steady arm of Ra crushing the Libyans in the Western Desert of Egypt causing them to flee from his sight....amusing as Merneptah would have been in his 60's by the time he came to the throne and one suspects the reality is that junior commanders did the fighting while he sat on his ass in the capital. Oddly, the stele is a copy ( more or less ) of an inscription which appears on the temple walls at Karnak, except for the last 10 lines which lack the gloriousness of the first 140. There are two problems with the traditional way of reading the stele. One, it never says that the pharaoh did any of the things in Canaan which he is credited with in Libya. Instead, we get:

Canaan is captive with all woe.
Ashkelon is conquered, Gezer seized,
Yanoam made nonexistent;
Israel is wasted, bare of seed,
Khor is become a widow for Egypt.

The problem is that Canaan, Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam had been controlled by Egypt for 4 centuries ( as noted above.) Khor (Syria) is a bizarre reference to our ears but the demarcation line between the Egyptian and Hittite empires was the Orontes river in Syria so perhaps this is an admission by Egypt that they can no longer dominate Syria?
Then we have the line that obviously makes you giddy "Israel is wasted, bare of seed." Again, as with the above, there is none of this "strong arm of Ra smiting the enemies of Egypt" shit. Moreover, there is another problem with that line. It does not say " Israel." What it says, in Egyptian (as that is the language the stele is written in ) is "Ysirir." The word was associated with "Israel" by 19th century archaeologist, Flinders-Petrie because it "sounded like Israel" but that is, really, absurd. We don't know what the Egyptians meant by the word and, most importantly, it appears no where else in the entire body of Egyptian writing we have found. If you want to get into what "sounds like" something we have the Jezreel Valley in the same general area as the named sites. A well known agricultural region and the basis for the later economic superiority of the northern kingdom of Israel over the southern kingdom of Judah. What better way to describe burned out farms than to call them "bare of seed?" As always, religious freaks see only what they want to see.

For that matter, the notion that we can read and translate ancient Egyptian word for word the way we do French and German is wrong. Take that first line. Other scholars have read it as "Canaan is plundered of everything." One could go on and on with this but the basic point remains. Unlike the beginning of the inscription ( the glorious part which did make it on to the temple wall) the last ten lines read like a modern after-action report. "Yeah - we won the war but we suffered some defeats in the process."

Now how do you know that this text wasn't written to counter the alleged delusions of Christianity,

I'm not sure you are saying what you want to say, there. Celsus was most definitely writing to counter the alleged delusions of xtians. It's a job which many of us now carry on because you are still just as deluded as you were then.