On the Reliability of the Old Testament, by K. A. Kitchen, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003, xxii & 662pp, hdbk. $
In this long awaited book one of the world’s leading Egyptologists and Orientalists writes to establish just what can and what can’t be said about the factuality of the Hebrew Scriptures from a historical point of view.
Prof. Kitchen begins with a strong censure of those minimalists for their sustained “gross misrepresentations of original, firsthand documentary data from the ancient Near East…regardless of the real facts of the case.” (Preface xiv). He inveighs against these “factually challenged” revisionists whose works wreak of “ideological claptrap,” as he puts it, but who get a hearing anyway. Clearly, Kitchen has had as much as he can take! The questions he gives himself to answering are “Have [the OT Scriptures] any claim whatsoever to present to us genuine information from within 2000 – 400 [B.C.]? And were they originated (as we have them) entirely within, say, 400 – 200 [B.C.]?” Employing all the sources that his considerable skill can muster he goes back in time, dividing biblical history into seven segments (5), looking first into Segment 6 (Divided Monarchy), then, in a kind of trombone action, the writer moves forward to Segment 7 (Exile and Return), before declining from Segment 5 (United Monarchy) back to Segment 1 (Primeval Proto-History). Along the way he covers a massive amount of data pertaining to individuals (e.g. Ethbaal, Baruch), cities, kingdoms and battles from archaeological, inscriptional, and other ancient literary evidence.
As an example of the sort of information stored in the book we discover that king-list comparisons show “the Hebrew writers in Kings, etc., have their Assyrian and Babylonian monarchs impeccably in the right order…And the basic forms of names given are also known to be closely accurate, contrasted with what is found in writings of the fourth to first centuries B.C.,” – the time when the revisionists say they were penned (23).
There are blemishes here and there, as when Kitchen dates the Exodus to the thirteenth century B.C., but all in all, he has given the evangelical world an excellent apologetic and historical resource.
