ReloadAg said:

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Other than the Bible are there some other books that do a good job of diving into some of the other history going on during Biblical times?

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What do you mean by "Biblical times"? Do you mean the time of Jesus, or the whole Old Testament times?

Either way, I'd strongly encourage you to read more than one book. Historians and archaeologists have strong biases as to the historicity of the Biblical accounts and show no hesitation in allowing their bias to affect their work. You ought to read from both perspectives and decide for yourself which one you think is most persuasive.

For example, I've spent the last 1 1/2 years doing a very deep dive into the historicity of the Exodus and the Israelite Conquest of Canaan. I've downloaded, read and outlined over 1,000 scholarly articles and 40+ scholarly books. I'm in the process now of turning that vast amount of information into something useable.

The overwhelming consensus among secular scholars is that both accounts in the Bible are largely fictional, written centuries after the events described. That is, rather than the Exodus account being written by Moses and the Conquest account being written by Joshua and others, both accounts were written by Jewish scribes centuries later during either the Babylonian captivity or during what is called the Hellenistic period. Interestingly, though, all such scholars use the Biblical accounts as a guide even while dismissing their historicity.

In my research, I've found that the secular scholars seem to start with the presumption that the Bible is not historically reliable and filter all evidence through that bias. Specifically, they ignore, discard or explain away the evidence supporting the Biblical account, focusing instead on any apparent inconsistencies without even considering perspectives that might make those apparent inconsistencies in fact consistent with the Biblical account.

A great example is Jericho, which is Exhibit A in the skeptics' criticisms of the Biblical accounts. Kathleen Kenyon dug it up in the 1950s, and concluded that it had been destroyed at least 150 years before the Hebrews and Joshua made their 7 trips around its walls. Almost everyone relies upon her conclusion to decide that the Biblical story of Jericho is fiction.

However, Kenyon's dating was based exclusively on the absence of a particular kind of pottery at Jericho (in particular, Cypriot Bichrome ware), ignoring the fact that previous excavators had found exactly that kind of pottery at Jericho and that she found at Jericho abundant examples of other types of pottery from the same time period as bichrome ware. She also attributed Jericho's destruction to either the Hyksos or Egypt, ignoring the fact that the form of destruction did not fit their style of attack, that there was no evidence at all that either group had been operating militarily in Canaan at that time, and that the destruction evidence she found precisely fit the Biblical account of Jericho's destruction. That is, she found that Jericho was destroyed in the early spring, that there was not a long siege, that vast amounts of carbonized grain still existed at Jericho and had not been seized by the conquering army, and that Jericho's walls fell outward, forming a ramp up over its rampart on which the walls rested.

Kenyon's pottery dating methodology has also been proven to be circular and simply wrong, a fact recognized by virtually all archaeologists, yet they still hold to the conclusions she reached on the basis of that flawed pottery dating. It's frustrating to read articles by secular archaeologists. What I've found is that ancient archaeology is based about 5% on facts and the rest is simply speculation and fiction.

A really, really smart lawyer I know has written a couple of overviews of the topic and has posted them online. He does a good job and is intellectually honest - in my research I have not found any mistake he's made. As a Christian, he is certainly biased in favor of the reliability and historicity of the Bible, but that does not make his conclusions necessarily wrong. His articles can be found here:

Archaeology and the Bible (theoutlet.us)

Israel, Egypt, and the Exodus (theoutlet.us)

There's also a pretty good website dedicated to Biblical historicity that's maintained by actual archaeologists: Home - Associates for Biblical Research (biblearchaeology.org). They have a lot of pretty good articles on a number of topics relating to OT Biblical historicity. Although I do not necessarily agree with them on every point, they are overall pretty accurate and thorough.

If you have any specific questions about the Exodus or the Conquest, let me know and I'll do my best to answer. I have a wealth of information and resources at my fingertips.