The bible and ancient history.

[Mudhammam]

When I was in high school guitar hero was a insanely popular game, everyone loved it. But many in the music business soon found out that many in to guitar hero had a harder time learning real guitar. It was because they made assumptions about the song based on their guitar hero experience. Experience and assumptions they made about the song would be flatly wrong.
I wonder if archeology suffers from the same problem. Perhaps we have been assuming the bible is even remotely accurate. I would propose that we throw the book out wholesale and try to eliminate all assumptions of the ancient world based on the Bible. That way we can start with a clean slate, and draw our conclusions based on the historical evidence. If that eventually does prove the bible accurate then so be it.

I think it's a mistake to read the Bible as though it were written to convey history in the sense that modernists use the term. It's an invaluable source for understanding the history of human psychology, religion, as well as containing some brilliant poetry and literature, but severely limited in its usefulness for establishing facts--like virtually everything else written 500 years ago and older.