In Old Testament history, Judah and Israel were relatively small in contrast to some of the more wealthy superpowers around them. This reflects the more modest ter-ritorial interests of Judah and Israel (to occupy a land given them by God) in con-trast to the aggressive ambitions of empires like Egypt, Assyria and Babylon.
But because these great empires sought to expand their borders, they all had need of the land bridge of Israel to help them in their conquests. A fortunate consequence of this military need is that we find records of Israel and Judah in the histories of these empires and opportunities to correlate what we read in the Bible with what we find in these accounts.
Lots of these corollaries exist in such non-biblical records, sometimes even naming Israelite leaders or towns, other times at least describing the same event that we read about in the Bible.
