Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, third edition (OUP: 2014), 22.
For the first ten or so books of the Bible, it is difficult to speak of history in any verifiable sense, since there are no records apart from the Bible itself of the individuals and events that those books contain. But as we move further into the Bible, as the narrative deals with events described as taking place in the first millennium BCE, we find more and more correlations between the Bible and nonbiblical ancient sources.
The Amateur Exegete 