I was cleaning out my grandmother's room at her nursing home and I came across "The Source" by James Michener. It tells the history of the Jewish people from the perspective of archeological artifacts found in a fictional mound in northern Israel. It looks intriguing, but I don't want to commit the time to reading a 400 page novel and come away with a lot of inaccuracies. Is the history in Michener's historical fiction accurate enough to be worth reading?
I have not read "The Source", but it would probably be worth reading if you are interested in the topic. Michener was the main person flogging epic historical fiction to Americans in the 50s, 60s and 70s. He took great pride his thorough research, and does seem to have put a lot of work into it. Than said, he was still writing historical fiction, not history, and nobody could really be an expert on all the many things he wrote about. I have read a few of his books, and usually the stuff that it not obviously fiction can be traced to real (if now often outdated) scholarship. Give it a try.
If you want to know more about his career, there is a nice analysis in ”How to be an American Abroad: James Michener's The Voice of Asia and Postwar Mass Tourism” from Klein, Christina. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in theMiddlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.