On the Reliability of the Old Testament (review)

Abstract

Hebrew Studies 46 (2005) 395 Reviews ON THE RELIABILITY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. By K. A. Kitchen. Pp xxii + 662. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003. Cloth, $45.00. Kenneth Kitchen appears to fancy himself in this work as a heroic scholarly warrior. He “attacks” the minimalists whom he sees as having done much to undermine the interpretation of the Old Testament as having historical value. He does this by his ad hominem advances, which are legion in this work. For Kitchen, historical reliability is defined as that which is authentic and has significant historical content and value. He is a well-known scholar who has been a prolific writer in both Egyptology and in biblical studies. The book apparently originated as an Old Testament counterpart to F. F. Bruce’s The New Testament Documents: Are they Reliable? (London: Inter-varsity Fellowship of Evangelical Unions, 1943), published over sixty years ago. However, Kitchen’s work is much larger in scope and purpose than the New Testament counterpart. As stated, one will be immediately aware of the polemic nature of Kitchen’s work, as he uses a barrage of adjectives to describe the minimalists and their positions (lunacy, immense ignorance, agenda-driven drivel, factually disadvantaged, dumb-cluck socio-anthropologists, ignoranti, and fantasizing sociologists). He is utterly unsympathetic to what he calls “sloppy thinking” and to those whom he believes base their theories on unproved assumptions. A few quotes may suffice: “The basic reason for endless shilly-shallying and lack of real result [concerning the historicity of Moses] is the massive failure to seek and use external, independent controls such as have been applied here and throughout” (p. 299). “This kind of speculative theorizing is all very well as a mode of experimentation in the abstract, or as a ‘flavor of the month’ fashion, or even just as simple indulgence in academic ego massage (‘Look how clever I can be!’)” (p. 390). “To expose in full the sloppy scholarship, immense ignorance, special pleading, irrelevant postmodernist-agenda-driven drivel would need another (and very boring) book as long as Thompson’s pair combined. It is sad to see real ability wasted in this way” (pp. 457–458). Perhaps Kitchen’s book would have contributed more to the scholarly debate over the historicity and historical reliability of the Old Testament if he had written in a more dispassionate manner. This is unfortunate because Kitchen is very thorough in his argumentation and documentation, and thus his work would have been an excellent resource for biblical scholars. Curiously, Kitchen uniquely organizes his book by surveying Old Testament material in a roughly chronologically backwards mode, presumably to begin with what is better known, and to proceed to the lesserknown material. He begins with the period of the divided monarchy, and continues with the exile and return, united monarchy, settlement in Canaan, Egypt and the Exodus, the Patriarchs, and lastly, primeval history. Kitchen Hebrew Studies 46 (2005) 396 Reviews provides an enormous amount of comparative evidence from the ancient Near East that relates to the biblical narrative in question, although he arguably places an inordinate value on these comparisons. Kitchen’s goal in the second chapter is to scan Kings and Chronicles for Israelite and foreign rulers mentioned there in comparison to external sources. He concludes that of the twenty foreign rulers mentioned in Kings-Chronicles, only a few have not been found in external sources, primarily because of poor source material during the period in question. From 853 B.C.E. on, the rate of mention of Israelite and Judahite kings in outside sources is proportionally higher than early periods. He concludes, from what he calls his “factual” examination, that this argues for the historicity of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah during the early first millennium. Kitchen argues in the third chapter that the reason that there is sparse (or no) textual information about the United Monarchy in outside sources is that the Assyrians had no interest or direct contact with Palestine until 853 B.C.E. Moreover, there are no Egyptian historical inscriptions concerning the area in this period either. He does claim that the Tel Dan inscription, as well as the Moabite Stone, mention the...