historical merits of the bible?

[Minimalist]

Of course there is valuable cultural history knowledge buried in there.

The bible is unreliable as a historical text. It's also unreliable when it comes to the culture of the time. Nothing is what it seems. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman make the case that the torah was codified in the 6th and 7th centuries B.C., yet it claims to describe a period long before then. In doing so, its authors appear to have created anachronisms by describing prior centuries using the context they were familiar with at the time they were writing. And examples such as the geographical mistakes in Mark make it clear that there is no part of the bible which is left untouched by persistent issues of unreliability. It's impossible to say which parts of the text are actually historical and which are merely fanciful, so the whole is useless for historical information.

Donald Redford preceded Finkelstein by 7 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_B._Redford

Redford was the winner of the 1993 "Best Scholarly Book in Archaeology" awarded by the Biblical Archaeology Society for his work Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times.[1] In the book he argues that the experiences of the Hyksos in Egypt became a central foundation of myths in Canaanite culture, leading to the story of Moses. He further argues that almost all the toponymic details in the Exodus story reflect conditions in Egypt not earlier than the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, the Saite period, namely the 7th century BC. Whoever, Redford argues, provided the author of Exodus with these details had no access to Egyptian material earlier than that date.[2] This view was expounded upon in The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman.