I am simply stating what is known. As to whether the Israeli scholars are "scholars" or not is not mine to determine, nor ours to question simply because we don't like what their findings suggest. Sripture is an expression of God's revelation and is a testament of faith. It matters little if it is historically, or physicially accurate -- as long as it is spiritually accurate.
My older daughter, who knew God at the age of 10, but attended an Evangelical school, said about dinosaurs: "the devil planted those bones for us to find and be deceived," she said. "Dinosaurs never did exist." Oh, I see!
I think the hesychast Fathers unlocked the mysery of faith, namely that prayer is at the core of knowing, and reaching God and not academics. And while they studied the Scripture fervently, they leave no doubt that faith moves one to pray and that prayer alone humbles us and brings us to God by His mercy.
As another blessed Father says "...faith is that which completes our argument." St. Gregory Nazianzen (Third theological Oration no. 21) Everything else is mental exercise.
"I am simply stating what is known."
The "findings" of archeology and history change all the time. Since these are not reproducible sciences, there is little in the way of objective, empirical knowledge in these matters. There are lots of things that earlier generations of scholars believed simply couldn't be true in the Bible, but that their later findings led them to believe that they were true, or at least to acknowledge that they could be true.
I've spent enough time in research laboratories to know that even under very controlled conditions, "what is known" can be very elusive. I'm also acutely aware of how much a desired result can affect any given scholar's "findings." This is no less true of agnostic Biblical scholars than it is of people who believe God put dinosaur bones in the earth.
Given those circumstances, I think that I would rely on the words of Christ and the writings of the Apostles regarding who did and didn't exist and what did and didn't happen in Old Testament times before I would rely on the latest assertions of any modern scholar.
"I think the hesychast Fathers unlocked the mysery of faith, namely that prayer is at the core of knowing, and reaching God and not academics."
I couldn't agree more. And I am hard-pressed to think of a hesychast Father who doesn't speak of the accounts of the Old Testament as being anything but literal truth. They are not *only* literal truth, nor is the literal historical account even the most important part of a given passage in the OT, but they are always treated as having happened. They are allegories, so to speak, that really happened. That is certainly how the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete treats them, for example.
In the Catholic world, knowledge is often transmitted in the form of a limerick. Teach your daughter this:
Dinosaurs nerver survived the Flood
They were useless in water and mud
Nor did Noah find charming
The four-legged fish Darwin
Who he caught with the Unicorn stud