50 Years Flashback: 1995: Kitchen Saves the Patriarchs

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In “The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?” (March/April 1995), Kenneth Kitchen revisited one of the most fraught questions in biblical archaeology: Was there really a patriarchal age, or were these stories made up centuries later to give Israel a legendary past? Using evidence from ancient archives, law codes, and covenants, Kitchen convincingly demonstrated that certain elements in the stories are found only in the early second millennium BCE, precisely when most scholars date the Patriarchs.