The Hebrew People and God's Special Protection

As human author of the Bible, the Hebrew people asserts that it is in receipt of spiritual assistance, inspiration; as an actor in biblical events, it declares that it enjoys God's special protection, the Covenant. To what extent does a historical view of the facts corroborate these two assertions?

From the purely literary point of view, there is a problem that is insoluble if we rule out divine intervention: how was this people without arts, philosophy, and any particular natural endowments able to produce this incomparable masterpiece, while people infinitely more advanced intellectually have left books full of gross moral and religious errors?

Fom the strictly historical point of view, how was this tiny people — in the time of Solomon's splendor, it never exceeded a million souls — able to exert such widespread influence? Persecuted, tortured, reduced in the dark days of the captivity "by the waters of Babylon" to fewer than a hundred thousand exiles, how was it able to survive right up to the present day, while mighty empires all around it have left us only ruins, inscriptions, and mummies? And why did the long trial that was its destiny lead it step by step, from suffering to suffering, ever upward toward revelation?

Henri Daniel-Rops, What is the Bible?