You said "Your statement (Modern history is a view from nowhere, recounting an unbiased and dispassionate set of facts) is, at best, what history should be in an ideal world." When you say that Herodotus and Tacitus were "pretty decent historians" you're judging them against a modern criteria that they were simply not trying to achieve. That isn't what history was for them. History in the ancient sense has the purpose of providing identity to people. In that regard, in the ancient sense, the OT in general and the Torah in particular is correctly aligned. But there's no effort to necessarily report Joe Friday's just the facts, or balance, or even maybe what we would call "true" by modern historical inquiry. Herodotus certainly makes no attempt to do so. The Aenid falls into this category of history.
Tacitus primary aim - as he himself says - is to record and witness to the character of the men about whom he wrote. In this regard he is very similar to Plutarch. And, accordingly, his work is sometimes influenced by, and sometimes opposed to Roman Imperial Propaganda. It's something of a cross of modern biography and a sermon or self-help book.
And in all cases, they are wound up with their contemporary views of philosophy, governance, and what we would call religion. Who should rule, and why, and what is justice, and what is the good life, and who are the people that accept this or that or the other.
So again, when you say the Torah is history I say yes - but it is ancient history, not modern. The purpose is not to recount the facts of a period of time, but to establish a narrative about a particular group of people: how they came to be, what identifies them as a people, their central identity and worldview, and what their purpose and role is in the world. Even the more "historical" points of the OT like Kings or Chronicles are the same. King Omri is a great example. He was one of, if not the most, geopolitically and regionally important king of the Northern Kingdom. He consolidated power, ended civil war, expanded territory, brought huge economic growth, and established a small dynasty. Outsiders referred to the Northern Kingdom not as Israel but as Bet Omri, the House of Omri. If 1 Kings were a history book by the modern sense of the word, he should have a lot of space. We get instead 6 verses that say nothing about any of that, only that he won the civil war, became king, bought a hill and built a city on it. The author of Kings is much more interested in telling us the story, the narrative arc, of the descent of Israel away from following Yahweh, and so the takeaway about Omri is he did more evil than all who were before him.
The modern history is even mentioned - "Now the rest of the acts of Omri that he did, and the might that he showed, are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel?" The author of Kings is not interested in this information, because Kings is not a modern history book.
You're making a tact assumption that accuracy is how you should measure, and you seem to think that when I say - this isn't intended to be history - that is me saying - it is not accurate. I can tell a story six different ways with varying focuses, and give you six completely different views of the events in that story. Depending on how you judge accuracy and completeness, some of those may be "history" and others not - but that's the wrong thing. Again, if you go to the scriptures looking for a modern history, you're going to have a bad time. They can witness to modern historical efforts; they can be sources for modern history, but they themselves are not, and are not trying to be, historical works in the modern sense.
That's why you look at St Matthew's genealogy and are confused. If he is writing history, it's simply incorrect. When you say "he was not writing as a historian" you are exactly right, but you are putting the silent modifier of modern historian in there. He wrote a history as much as the Torah is history. St Luke as well. They both wrote histories, both with the same purpose behind them. But neither were modern histories, and to approach them in this way abuses the texts and causes confusion and disappointment.
So again. None of the bible was written as (modern) history. That says nothing whatever about its credibility or trustworthiness. And you can go down the same rabbit hole about science - none of the authors were attempting to explain natural phenomena in a systematic way, were even interested in doing so, or were likely even able to conceive of such a thing.
