Did the Biblical Exodus ever happen?

In 1970 I devoured a book which explored the Exodus as part of a GLOBAL catastrophe. In it documents and documented legends, etc point to nations all around the world suffering similar events to the Egyptian plagues, followed by periods of intense darkness, famine and re-location.

And that's before I get onto pole reversal, prolonged darkness, ambrosia (manna = 'honey') and rivers of honey.

Some of Velikovsky's specific postulated catastrophes included:A tentative suggestion that Earth had once been a satellite of a "proto-Saturn" body, before its current solar orbit.
That the Deluge (Noah's Flood) had been caused by proto-Saturn's entering a nova state, and ejecting much of its mass into space.
A suggestion that the planet Mercury was involved in the Tower of Babel catastrophe.
Jupiter had been the culprit for the catastrophe that saw the destruction of the "Cities of the Plain" (Sodom and Gomorrah)
Periodic close contacts with a cometary Venus (which had been ejected from Jupiter) had caused the Exodus events (c.1500 BCE) and Joshua's subsequent "sun standing still" (Joshua 10:12 & 13) incident.
Periodic close contacts with Mars had caused havoc in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE.

The fundamental criticism against this book from the astronomy community was that its celestial mechanics were irreconcilable with Newtonian celestial mechanics, requiring planetary orbits which could not be made to conform to the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of angular momentum (Bauer 1984:70). Velikovsky conceded that the behavior of the planets in his theories is not consistent with Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation. He proposed that electromagnetic forces could be the cause of the movement of the planets, although such forces between astronomical bodies are essentially zero (Friedlander 1995:11-12).Velikovsky tried to protect himself from criticism of his celestial mechanics by removing the original Appendix on the subject from Worlds in Collision, hoping that the merit of his ideas would be evaluated on the basis of his comparative mythology and use of literary sources alone. However this strategy did not protect him: the appendix was an expanded version of the Cosmos Without Gravitation monograph, which he had already distributed to Shapley and others in the late 1940sand they had regarded the physics within it as egregious.

From 1924 to 1939 Velikovsky lived in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, practising medicine (both general practice and psychiatry), and also psychoanalysis (he had studied under Sigmund Freud's pupil, Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna). During this time he had a dozen or so papers published in medical and psychoanalytic journals, including, in 1930, the first paper to suggest that epilepsy is characterised by abnormal encephalograms,[13] now part of the routine diagnostic procedure, and papers in Freud's Imago, including a precocious analysis of Freud's own dreams.[14]

His work deserves more honest assessment. Now there is a growing movement of dissident scientists and researchers continuing his themes.

The old Newtonian/ Einsteinian gravity-only paradigms are being superceded. The Old cosmology crowd are rigidly sticking to their black holes and Big Bangs while it is becoming clear that electricity plays an enormous role in the entire universe. There is no religious agenda only a re-assessment of the past 100 years of dogma.

I would prefer to see some less orthodox, biased quotations than wikipedia in future. You couldn't find a more conservative, old school, anti-progress crowd if you tried.