It is not uncommon to read a modern Christian scholar state that it is no longer possible to uncover the original text of the Hebrew Scriptures. This results from the manner in which they recorded history, the numerous stages of editing, as well as unintended errors made during copying. Further, there was any number of variant readings, as the DSS attest. It was therefore enlightening to read the following from a Jewish Scholar:
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Two significant problems with using the Bible as a historical source must be acknowledged. The first is that it is fundamentally a theological document. Though it certainly relates many historical events, its authors were not primarily interested in the accurate depiction of the past. The past is almost always refracted through a theological lens, and often through a partisan political-ideological lens as well. These lenses are a fundamental part of biblical texts. Thus, it is not sufficient to simply take God out of the picture, and to rewrite biblical tests in terms of "normal" historical causality rather than divine causality.
The Bible is not unique in this respect—in fact, it is typical of ancient Near Eastern historical writing as a whole. It would barely be an overstatement to point out that almost all these texts center on the divine realm as much as the human.For example, according to the Mesha inscription, from Israel's Moabite neighbors to the east, Israel was able to subjugate Moab because "Kemosh [the Moabite high god] was angry at his land." Yet, this has not caused all historians of the ancient Near East to avoid every use of such documents in writing ancient history. Sources must be used with care: modern historians must be aware of the deep biases of the authors of these sources, and whenever possible, various sources that refer to the same event must be studied together, since they are often mutually enlightening. But these sources should not simply be discarded.
The second problem of using the Bible as a source concerns the unusually complex transmission of the biblical text. Most sources for ancient Near Eastern history were unearthed in the last two centuries; they typically represent tablets or steles that were written soon after the events that they record. These ancient documents were usually not recopied extensively and were buried for two millennia or more before being uncovered. In contrast, the Bible was transmitted on papyrus and parchment in antiquity, and was changed as it was transmitted, at least in its earliest stages. It is naive to believe that we may recover the Bible's original text (what scholars call the "Urtext"), namely the text as penned by its original authors. The biblical texts found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the evidence of ancient Bible translations—especially the Septuagint (the pre-Christian translation of the Bible into Greek)—suggest that even in antiquity, many different versions of the same text circulated. The multiple forms of texts in the Second Temple period confirms that we cannot, for example, assume that the text of Kings as we now have it is the same as the text of Kings when it was originally written.
This is a serious problem that is not unique to the Hebrew Bible. Almost all classical texts suffer from the same issue—we have relatively few papyri that have survived from antiquity, and even these are not autographs by the original authors. Most are medieval manuscripts. Especially in Classical Studies, the methods of textual reconstruction are well developed, allowing scholars to piece together the best text possible using the many texts and other kinds of evidence that are available to them. This discipline is as much an art as a science, yet there is a consensus that is helpful in reconstructing texts. Although scholars do not have the original works by an ancient Greek historian such as Herodotus or Thucydides, they recreate Greek history via the textual criticism of manuscripts that postdate the author by centuries. In the same careful way, we may reconstruct history using the Bible.
Though I am suggesting that theological and ideological biases, as well as issues of textual transmission, do not present insuperable problems, they are nevertheless serious impediments to writing a history of Israel. This means that a history of ancient Israel can never be written with finality. However, since historical background is useful for understanding many biblical texts, I have not given up on this venture. ( How to read the Jewish Bible: The Bible's Limits as a Source for History pp. 22-23, Marc Zvi Brettler, Oxford University Press, 2007)