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There were a couple of other "events" in The Bible that never happened either. The Deluge was one of them (actually the Epic of Gilgamesh) and the Exodus was another, because there never was an Egyptian captivity period. No captivity, ergo no Exodus.
Probably 95% of what the Bible says happened never actually happened. David never had an empire (if he existed at all he was a tribal chieftan of a backwater village) and Joshua didn't bring down the walls of Jericho (they had fallen centuries before).
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Archaeologists have uncovered similar-but-not-exact account of not Hebrews but Hyksos in ancient Egyptian record, and the Hyksos were lepers that weren't so much in captivity as they were quarrantined. Then they got out and ran the place for a while before getting kicked out of Egypt altogether.
The Jews may have stolen some elements of the story of the Hyksos, but they weren't the Hyksos themselves. The Jews were Canaanites who became culturally separate from their neighbors (possibly by the creation of a taboo against eating pork).
If God wanted us to be Atheists we'd be born that way.
