For over 2,000 years, these stories were told verbally around the campfire....and never were written down until you reach a point where written language started to exist. So, there’s some pretty good odds that ages might have gotten shifted around and maybe told a bit different, until some guy fixated all this to exact dates with written words. So I might not be too worried or too trusting of this number business. Some of us are lucky if we barely remember our wife’s birthday.
The Old Testament was written during the exile away from Israel.