That question is one of the most controversial topics in Biblical studies today. The answer to that question has enormous ramifications not only in scholarship, but in the very real world of Mideastern politics. I count myself among the mainstream scholars who give a great deal of credence to the Hebrew Bible to the extent that it can be corroborated by archaeological scholarship. You've probably heard the term. Deconstruction has flourished in many English and comparative literature departments for the past two decades.
Scholars deny the book or work of art any inherent meaning.
I am willing to grant that as a part of literary criticism, deconstruction may have some merits, but in practice its more extreme form tends to intellectual anarchy and to anti-establishment politics. Until quite recently, archaeologists who work in Israel have not weighed in on the revisionist controversy, even though they all consider themselves, in some sense, historians of ancient Israel. Most did not become involved even when revisionist Biblical scholars, in desperation, began to invoke archaeological data, having lost confidence in the Biblical texts as sources for history writing. Two very recent developments, however, have brought some archaeologists, both Israeli and American into the fray. One development is the increasing abuse of archaeological theory, method, and data by Biblical scholars, who, as non-specialists, are simply not competent to deal with the mass of complex new data now in hand.