Archaeologist Israel Finkelstein leads the case at the center of this film: that decades of digging in Israel and Egypt contradict much of the Old Testament's own timeline. The film follows the excavation record for the Exodus, and finds no trace of a mass departure from Egypt or forty years in the Sinai, no matching Egyptian records of the plagues or the drowned army. It examines the walls of Jericho, dated by archaeologists to centuries before Joshua could have brought them down, and the kingdom of David and Solomon, whose Jerusalem shows little sign of the wealth the text describes. Interviews with biblical scholars and historians build an alternative account: the Old Testament as a text compiled largely under King Josiah in the seventh century BC, using older oral traditions to build a unified national identity for a small hill-country kingdom. The film treats the Bible as a historical document written for a political purpose, not a transcript, and lets the excavated evidence make that argument stone by stone.