This book is the presentation of material from a doctoral thesis that took a couple of decades to get out. While containing interesting ideas and hypotheses, it suffers greatly from the extremely inflated ego of the author, who presents mere hypotheses as fact, and merely notes a couple of times in the middle of long footnotes that the archaeologists and anthropologists don't agree with him. His sourcing is questionable, as much is derived from secondary sources, primarily books written for a lay audience. In addition, he appears to ignore a substantial portion of the scholarship on this issue, preferring to pick and choose a handful of sources that he can use to support his arguments, without engaging the arguments of other scholars that don't come to the same conclusions. The book is further marred by the author's puritanical insistance on using the exact Hebrew or Aramaic spelling of Biblical names, which is bad form in a book written for a general audience, as it becomes in-your-face promotion of the knowledge of the author, and does not serve to move the book along; in fact, it gets it bogged down in minutiae that might be appropriate in a doctoral thesis, but not in a general audience book that seeks to "correct" a lack: the fact that information on the origins of the Bible is unavailable to the ordinary lay person. That fact alone calls into question some of the premises of the author, as by the time this book was published, there were several other books on that topic, some of which he cites in his footnotes and bibliography. Another weakness is his logical fallacies; his initial premise was based on circular reasoning, and he mangles logic in several other places, as well, in one place even taking absence of evidence for evidence of presence! This book was clearly an ego-trip for the author, and that's unfortunate, because he has some interesting and thought-provoking ideas that could generate a great deal of valuable discussion if he wasn't so determined to be the smartest guy in the room. ( )