Penguin,
My point is that we have a verifiable context in which the salvation history of Israel, not merely its history, is said to take place, and yes, which one must take on faith. All the bare bones of that history exist in empirical fashion. I know you understand the Exodus to never have happened, but there is also a significant number of scholars, such as Karen Armstrong (no friend of Christians), who propose an event that was more significant in the life of a small group of proto-Hebrew slaves than those of their Egyptian overlords, and yet was enough to serve as the kernel of the emerging Hebrew identity. Over much development and redaction, of course. Likewise, I have read scholarly proposals for a King David, and a far less jewelled and wealthy Solomon.
It is the case that, for Israel, we have a record of a people practicing the Semitic, Abrahamic faith, who followed migration patterns which lay the basis of the legendary stories of Joshua, over powering the native inhabitants of Canaan, whose real kings or priests did leave the city of Jerusalem with two destroyed temples, Hezekiah's wall, whose elites were carted off to Babylon, whose royal courts were pestered by an irritating prophetic zeal. On the whole, there is concrete evidence for the essential dialogue that makes up the Hebrew Scriptures- the constant call, be it in the mouth of prophets and spirituals, to maintain a distinctive Israel faithful to its percieved vocation, whose purpose is to serve as a purified priestly people of a single God. In the end, these forces largely suceeded and Israel mostly rooted its pagan practices from its lands, cults and scriptures.
Again, as I stated before, I believe that Israel remembered its history according to its theological significance- that is to say Israel's sacred history can only be accessed by faith. Its secular history, however, is quite open to the other senses, and without this secular history there could be no sacred history, not entierly dissimilar to the fact that, without the bread and wine, there could be no sacramental Body and Blood in the Mass.
I don't understand such a basic skeleton to exist for the claims put forward by the BOM- which proposes a Semitic civilizaion on North American soil which was later Christianized by the same gospel which radically transformed Europe, Asia minor and Africa. Yet, besides the works of a few LDS apologists, there is no trace of such a people.
