Here's a review of the 2003 edition of Kitchen in BibSac:
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On the Reliability of the Old Testament. By Kenneth A. Kitchen. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003. xxii + 662 pp. $45.00.
Kitchen may be the preeminent Old Testament apologist of the past one hundred years. Not since the days of Robert Dick Wilson, William Henry Green, and Oswald T. Allis has there been a scholar as well equipped and as ready to take up arms in defense of the historicity and general reliability of the Old Testament record. In addition to numerous articles in support of such matters Kitchen authored the well-known handbooks Ancient Orient and Old Testament (Chicago: InterVarsity, 1966) and The Bible in Its World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1977), among others. And all this by an Egyptologist best known outside evangelical circles for his authoritative works in that discipline such as The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (1100–650 b.c.) (Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips, 1973) and Pharaoh Triumphant: The Life and Times of Ramesses II, King of Egypt (Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips, 1983).
The present work, though technically not a history of Israel, is concerned primarily to reestablish the Old Testament as a reliable record of that history in the face of postmodern attempts to rob it of any semblance of historical credibility. In his response to these approaches Kitchen regularly makes the transition from apologist to polemicist, a move not surprising to readers familiar with his other works. This may vitiate the effectiveness of his arguments among the targets of his frequently withering attacks, but they are not likely to read his work anyway for the very reason he suggests, namely, a closed-system a priorism that refuses to examine any evidence outside their own predetermined boundaries. Others, however, will read Kitchen with appreciation, perhaps even glee, where he “lets ’em have it” or “gives ’em what they deserve.” This is not likely to be productive if the intention is to understand opposing positions and know how to respond to those deemed intellectually and theologically deficient.
Kitchen’s method seems at first to be wrong-headed because he begins at the end and ends at the beginning. That is, he traces the history of the postexilic period first and then works his way back to the very beginning, what he calls “Back to Methusaleh—and Well Beyond.” The rationale for this, however, is quite clear and sensible, for Kitchen wants to begin with an era best documented by extrabiblical data and then, having made a strong case for the Old Testament’s reliability there, to move to earlier times where such evidence is increasingly rare. The point is that if late periods of history can be shown to be corroborated by unimpeachable secular sources, it follows a fortiori that earlier ones should at least be given presumptive benefit of the doubt.
On the whole, Kitchen makes a good case for his thesis, but sometimes he does so at the expense of self-consistency or even by fudging on matters of historical event, especially where the supernatural is involved. Speaking of the death of Sennacherib’s army, for example, Kitchen explains the “visitation that brought sudden death to a large part of the Assyrian force,” as “food poisoning or whatever?” (p. 41). There is no word here of direct divine intervention. More serious, however, is his attempt to support a late date for the Exodus—a position for which he is well known—in light of evidence to the contrary. He dismisses Bryant Wood’s compelling arguments for an early fourteenth-century destruction of Jericho by simply asserting that P. Bienkowski “corrected” Wood, but Kitchen does not say how (p. 544 n. 89). He then ignores the three-hundred-year period from the beginning of the Conquest to the judgeship of Jephthah by deriding Jephthah as “a roughneck, an outcast” whose words are “nothing more than a brave but ignorant man’s bold bluster in favor of his people” (p. 209). Kitchen has no grounds for such an assertion, but he must in some way rid himself of the three hundred years that anchor the Conquest (and hence the Exodus) in the late fifteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Resort to begging the question in this way does not help his case.
At another point Kitchen admits that Moses could not (or did not) return to Egypt from Midian until a new king reigned (p. 296). He says nothing, however, about the fact that the king whose death cleared the way for Moses’ return had to have reigned for at least forty years according to clear biblical testimony (Exod. 2:23; cf. 4:19; 7:7). That being the case, Ramesses II, Kitchen’s pharaoh of the Exodus, is disqualified since only he reigned that long in the nineteenth dynasty and therefore his successor would have been the Exodus king. But that was Merenptah, whose reign commenced after 1214 b.c. and who in his fifth year already mentioned Israel in a famous monument found at Thebes. The Exodus could hardly have occurred in his reign! This leaves only Amenhotep II (ca. 1427–1400) of Dynasty 18 as the pharaoh of the Exodus, for only he followed a king (Thutmose III) who reigned for at least forty years. The only way to discount this evidence is to deny the forty-year duration of Moses’ Midianite sojourn and thus to violate Kitchen’s own general method of taking the biblical historical data at face value.
This said, the fact remains that Kitchen has left all students committed to biblical factuality greatly in his debt. The erudition of this work is breathtaking, the scope of its treatment most impressive, and the cogency of the case as a whole most convincing. Serious students cannot and must not ignore it.
Dallas Theological Seminary. (2005; 2006). Bibliotheca Sacra Volume 162 (vnp.162.646.242-162.646.244). Dallas Theological Seminary.
Kitchen's
theological background needs to be remembered when presenting his material to skeptics and atheists. Also, as he is primarily an Egyptologist you'll find some who don't accept him as an authority outside that field.
Here's another review, very favourable, but from an Evangelical journal less balanced than BibSac:
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On the Reliability of the Old Testament, by K. A. Kitchen. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. Pp. 662.
Kenneth Kitchen is one of the premier Egyptologists in the world today. He has written many works that address the issues of Old Testament studies and ancient history. One of his well-known works, The Ancient Orient and the Old Testament, has been used by evangelical seminaries since the 1970s and is a classic in the field. This most recent work is a culmination of his earlier work as it enhances and brings it up-to-date.
Kitchen begins this work with comments on the current state of contemporary Old Testament research. He is disturbed by “increasingly extreme views” about the study of the Old Testament and the “gross misinterpretations of original firsthand documentary data from the ancient Near East... regardless of the real facts of the case.” Much of what passes as sound scholarship today is nothing more than “political correctness” which assumes that “the Old Testament writings are unreliable and of negligible value” (xiv). The purpose of Kitchen’s work is to expose these biases and to examine the ancient Near Eastern data and the Old Testament in a more objective fashion.
Many scholars today maintain that the writings of the Old Testament were not recorded until late in Israel’s history in the Persian and Greek periods (400-200 B.C.) and are nothing more than fiction. Kitchen contends that these views do not square with what we know of the history of the ancient Near East. He refers to the recent archaeological finds which include twenty thousand tablets discovered in Syria at Mari that date to the eighteenth century B.C., as well as the finds at Ebla, Ugarit, and Emar. Many of these documents, due to their massive number, have still not been examined at the present time. Yet we do know enough about the ancient Near Eastern treaty forms (analogous in structure to the biblical covenants, tracing six different phases), each with its own distinctive format. But perhaps more pertinent to Kitchen’s argument, these myriads of inscriptions indicate how widespread the phenomenon of writing early was in the second millennium B.C. Since writing was so widespread in the ancient Near East, centuries before the time of Moses, why did Israel lag so far behind so as not to produce records of her history until a millennium and a half later? One senses at the outset that biblical documents, due to their theological implications, are not treated in the same manner as “secular” inscriptions.
Kitchen arranges his work based upon the phases of Israel’s history that have the most extrabiblical support. Thus, he begins his discussion of the periods of Israel’s history by addressing the time period of the divided kingdoms of Israel and Judah. What Kitchen does in this chapter is to isolate all of the non-Israelite kings mentioned in this time frame and then examine extrabiblical inscriptions to see if their reigns can be substantiated. Of the twenty foreign rulers mentioned during the time of the divided kingdom when the northern and southern kingdoms were frequently in contact with other nations, Kitchen demonstrates that all but two, or possibly three, of these rulers are attested in external records from the ancient Near East. What’s more, nine of fourteen Israelite kings are mentioned in these extrabiblical sources! Of the five kings not mentioned, three of them (Zechariah, Shallum, and Pekahiah) had combined reigns of less than two years, while two others (Jehoahaz and Jeroboam II) reigned when Assyria was not at all active in the area of Syria and Palestine. Furthermore, extrabiblical Hebrew inscriptions mention nine of the kings of Israel and Judah who ruled during the time of the divided monarchy. With all of this supporting data one should draw no other conclusion than the biblical records which record the events of this time period are completely reliable.
The next era of Israel’s history that Kitchen addresses is the time of exile and return, the period that follows the divided kingdom. The events and type of life reflected in works such as Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther are in complete harmony with sources from the Persian period. Moreover, the use of Aramaic for correspondence in Ezra and Nehemiah, the lingua franca of the period, testifies to the authenticity of these biblical books.
From the exile and return, Kitchen moves to the period of the united monarchy. During the previous two periods we have noted that there is a vast amount of data that overlaps with the biblical period and even mentions biblical people and events. But this material postdates the critical year 853 B.C. This date marks not only the beginning of Assyrian sources recording the names of their adversaries but also the beginning of Assyria’s contact with Israel. In that year Shalmaneser III had hostile contact with Ahab, king of Israel. Perhaps the most significant archaeological find of the period is the Tel Dan stela excavated in 1993 and 1995. At this site an inscription was uncovered that is now known to be the first nonbiblical reference to David. The inscription refers to David as the founder of the Judean dynasty and has been dated to a mere 150 years after David’s death.
Kitchen refers to two important parallels between biblical data and ancient Near Eastern discoveries. First of all, the boundaries of the homeland of the Sumerian Empire during the reign of Ur Nammu (2100 B.C.) are virtually identical in form to the boundary descriptions of Joshua. In addition, a scene in the tomb chapel of the vizier Rekhmire (circa 1450) shows mainly foreign slaves “making bricks for the workshop-storeplaces of the Temple of Amun at Karnak in Thebes.” This description provides a historical parallel for the work of the Israelite slaves in Egypt.
Nothing in the writings from Exodus to Deuteronomy is out of place with what we know of the ancient Near East around Moses’ time in the second millennium B.C. If these archaeological finds had been known late in the nineteenth century, the critical reading the Old Testament popularized by Julius Wellhausen that became “mainstream” would never have been conceived. As Kitchen laments: “One can only shake one’s head in sorrow over the sad history of Old Testament scholarship in the last two hundred years” (497) and, “Let us agree to part with imaginary and outdated evolutionary schemes and give them decent and final burial” (499).
The book is well written and extremely well documented. The reader will also find Kitchen’s dry, British wit rather entertaining. This can be seen in some of his chapter titles such as: “The Empire Strikes Back—Saul, David, and Solomon” and the chapter on the Patriarchs—”Founding Fathers or Fleeting Phantoms.” When all is said and done, Kitchen convincingly shows that the writings of the Old Testament come out remarkably well when they are treated fairly and even-handedly.
This work is of great apologetic value for those who question the history and authenticity recorded in the Old Testament. Kitchen is up-to-date on archaeological discoveries relating to the Old Testament. He thoroughly documents major and recent finds for those who want to pursue the discoveries further. His methodology is “to seek to be as factually based as possible, in dealing both with the biblical text as a transmitted artifact and with the rich if intricate external materials” (222). The book is valuable for all those interested in Old Testament history and could be profitably read in conjunction with works that focus on Old Testament history. For the pastor who is especially interested in preaching Old Testament texts and seeks to interact with critics of the Bible, this source serves a great purpose. Also for pastors who minister to those who have been influenced by liberal thinkers (who have made it their ambition to undermine the authenticity of the Bible), this would be a great tool to place in their hands.
The work is a great monument and tribute to a man who throughout his academic life has sought to let the Bible speak for itself.
Mark F. Rooker
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. (2004; 2006). Faith and Mission Volume 21 (vnp.21.3.113-21.3.116). Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
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