Religion

If you study the broad history of Western Europe, you are mostly studying England, France, Germany, and a group of secondary countries like Spain and Italy that pop in and out. They don't really seem to care much about the history of Belgium. It's always been a bit player in region. I'm sure it has a very interesting history, and there must be people who specialize in it. It's just not of much broad interest compared to other nations.

So if you are studying the entire ancient Near East, you are mostly studying the great civilizations of Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Persia, Egypt etc. Israel was mostly just a piece of land that empires fought over. Not much interest on the regional scale. But a lot of people specialize in ancient Israel because it improbably turned out to have an outsize influence on later cultures. So it's of interest for its own sake. There are scholars who are interested in figuring out what was really going on in that little patch land. And in part, that means mining the Bible for clues and trying to match Biblical accounts with new discoveries. If this doesn't interest you, I can understand. But that doesn't make it an illegitimate exercise.