In spite of an enormous emphasis placed and significant space given within the Bible concerning the Israelites migration in to Egypt, along with the accompanying life story of Joseph of adopted royal linage, the plagues, expulsion and pursuit into the "wilderness" resulting in the loss of the Pharaoh's very expansive and expensive army; ancient writings experts and archeologist's have found no collaborating evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt or in the "wilderness."
Scientific research and geographical evidence has not found any way to explain the crossing of the Red, or Reed, Sea, nor the loss of an entire army in same.
So. Was it all fabrication? Well, James Kugel seems to believe it might have been "cut from different pieces of fabric" as he calls it. The story may have some elements of truth in isolated and unrelated events in the past of the author(s) life but were somehow pulled together to create a peoples who desperately needed a historical record that was different than it was in reality. All in order to explain why they were "God's chosen."
Modern historians will agree that even short term history, as in that of the United States, has been written from a very white man's point of view. Women, Blacks and Indians, the other major components of this country's history, have been largely ignored, misrepresented or downplayed.
Even with the checks and balances of the 18th and 19th century historians we have a distinctly distorted view of our country's early struggles in emergence. Take those parameters back 3,000 years and imagine the chaos you would have at the hands of an extremely few would could read and write.
Mind boggling.
