The Kitchen Debate

048

On the Reliability of the Old Testament

Kenneth A. Kitchen

(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003) 662 pp., $45

When we received a copy of Kenneth A. Kitchen’s new book, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, we knew that we should review it. Kitchen is one of the world’s leading scholars (he specializes in Egyptology), and the subject matter of the book—how historically accurate is the Bible?—is of central interest to many of our readers. We asked Ronald Hendel, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a columnist for our sister magazine, Bible Review, to review it for us.

When we assigned the book to Professor Hendel, however, we did not know—and presumably he did not know when he accepted the assignment—that he is identified in the book by name and his scholarship is heavily criticized. We learned this when we received Hendel’s review because he candidly quoted Professor Kitchen’s criticisms.

Our problem was this: Was it fair to assign the review to Professor Hendel in these circumstances? To balance what might be regarded as an inappropriate choice of reviewer, we decided to assign a counter-review to Professor William Hallo, professor emeritus at Yale University, who had written a complimentary blurb for the jacket of Kitchen’s book (although normally we would not assign a review to someone who had written a complimentary blurb).

Professor Hallo’s review of the same book is very different from Professor Hendel’s. Both reviews are insightful and provide a fascinating exchange, even though they are not directly addressed to one another; they are both about the book and the important issues the book raises.

With these two reviews in hand, the thought occurred to us: Why not go to the horse’s mouth? Since we’re talking about the book, why not hear the author’s reaction to the comments of two distinguished scholars? So we asked Professor Kitchen to give us his thoughts about the two contrasting reviews of his book—neither of which, incidentally, fully supports him.—Ed.

049

“Erudition and Bluster”

By Ronald S. Hendel

Kenneth Kitchen is an eminent Egyptologist, having written standard works on ancient Egypt of the second and first millennia B.C.E. He also moonlights as a historian of the Old Testament and has previously published two books on this subject for an evangelical press (Inter-Varsity). The tenor and quality of his work vary widely between these two venues. As an Egyptologist, he is an erudite critical historian. As a Biblicist, his scholarship is a curious blend of erudition, bluster and pre-critical dogma. He has no doubt, for example, that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, Joshua wrote the Book of Joshua, Solomon wrote at least the first 25 chapters of Proverbs, Isaiah wrote the whole Book of Isaiah, and so on. But he desperately wants to establish these prior convictions on historical grounds. That passionate desire is the motivation for this book, which sums up Kitchen’s work on the subject over roughly the last 50 years.

Kitchen uses colorful and overblown language to interact with scholars whose views he does not share. He tends to characterize his own views and interpretations as objective facts, while the interpretations of other scholars are characterized as ignorant fantasy (as in one section titled, “Grandiose Theories Versus Permanent and Persistent Facts”). I was vastly entertained by Kitchen’s description of my own work on the Patriarchal narratives as “entirely misguided,” “swarming with errors” and “perversely misconstrued.” But I am in good company, since Kitchen thinks that most critical Biblical scholarship of the last 200 years “could be profitably pulped and recycled.” One of his favorite adjectives for his foes is “ignorant,” which carries the tone of Dan Aykroyd’s inevitable putdown of Jane Curtin on the old Saturday Night Live newscast (“Jane, you ignorant slut”). This book is an odd combination of preconceived notions, broad knowledge of ancient Near Eastern history and curmudgeonly putdowns.

Kitchen’s method consists primarily of collecting scads of ancient Near Eastern data that he argues provides the correct context for the “data” of the Biblical stories, and then explaining away the Biblical bits that don’t fit his preferred early date for the stories. So, for example, the covenant at Sinai in the Pentateuch (including its repetition in Deuteronomy and the ceremony in Joshua 24) “belongs squarely … within 1400–1200 [B.C.E.] and at no other date.” Kitchen achieves this result by picking and choosing Biblical verses and constructing a typology that he then compares with a similarly simplistic typology of ancient Near Eastern treaties from Sumerian to Assyrian times. He doesn’t mind that specific curses from an Assyrian treaty seem to be quoted in Deuteronomy, because he has lots of (looser) second-millennium B.C.E. parallels, and these are the ones he prefers.

How was this Late Bronze Age Pentateuch composed and transmitted? Kitchen asserts that Moses knew these treaty forms because he was raised in the Egyptian court and that he wrote the Pentateuch in late Canaanite. He argues that “standard Hebrew evolved out of this form of Canaanite,” and that “copies of older works such as Deuteronomy or Joshua would be recopied, modernizing outdated grammatical forms and spellings.” So we have a text of Deuteronomy written in seventh to sixth century B.C.E. Hebrew that was actually written by Moses 600 years earlier in late Canaanite, but all the original linguistic features have been airbrushed away. And the whole argument is absolutely factual!

There is a huge mass of data in this book, strung together with arguments of varying degrees of perspicacity and humbug. One of my favorites is Kitchen’s assertion that the story of Abraham and Sarah in Egypt (Genesis 12:10–20) is an authentic second-millennium B.C.E. history because “visits by an Abraham or a Jacob to a pharaoh at an East Delta palace are only feasible in Egyptian terms within circa 1970–1540” B.C.E. (though the Abraham story doesn’t mention the Delta, and such a setting exists for much of the first millennium B.C.E., too), and at this time “the pharaohs were commonly partial to attractive foreign ladies, as finds and texts for the Middle and New Kingdoms attest.” Did later pharaohs suffer a lack of libido or prefer plainer ladies? This is an absurd (though rather funny) historical argument. On a similar note, Kitchen claims that one of the reasons the story of the Israelite spies at Jericho (Joshua 2) is historical is that “The female tavern-keeper phenomenon (cf. Rahab) is valid down to circa 1100, after which customs changed.” However Rahab is not a tavern-keeper but a prostitute (is tavern-keeper a Kitchen euphemism?), and I’m not sure that such things changed much after 1100 B.C.E. Perhaps Kitchen should get out more often.

I was surprised that Kitchen leaves very little room for God in his historical analysis of the Old Testament. Although he intimates that he is “gifted with faith,” and as such has no difficulty in believing that an eighth-century B.C.E. Isaiah could predict Cyrus’s return of the Jews from Babylonian Exile in the sixth century B.C.E., he says repeatedly that the Biblical writers shared the theological beliefs of their age in 050attributing historical events to divine agency. “The support of the deity is repeatedly invoked in what are otherwise straightforward historical accounts, because that is simply how the ancients saw their world.” So are the miracles in the Bible simply misconstruals of historical events? Kitchen argues that the Egyptian plagues were natural phenomena (insect infestations, sandstorms, etc.) that Moses interpreted as divine intervention, as would his ancient peers. The destruction of the walls of Jericho was a “precise seismic movement” as was the much earlier destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The flood was “an epochally important flood in far antiquity” that was remembered in both Biblical and Mesopotamian tradition. And so on. The upshot is that Kitchen argues that the Bible is historically true but theologically naive. Even the Sinai covenant does not come from God but from Moses’ schooling in the Late Bronze Age Egyptian academy. Unless Kitchen is winking and nodding throughout this book, I don’t see how his analysis buttresses any theological position. Is God not in the details? Is Kitchen a historical maximalist but a theological minimalist? I doubt it, but I don’t see how his intended audience will gain much theological comfort from this book.

A Context for the Biblical Account

By William W. Hallo

I take some credit—or accept some blame, depending on your point of view—for introducing the terms “maximalist” and “minimalist” into the discussion of Biblical history and what used to be called Biblical archaeology. Twenty-five years ago I proposed them as alternatives to the more pejorative epithets then being bandied about—terms such as pseudoorthodox on the one side and nihilist on the other. At the same time, I held up Assyriologists as models of sober and dispassionate devotion to the issues. And I commended three different books by Kenneth Kitchen for the same attitude in Egyptology and for the “contextual” approach in general. I was confident that if biblicists took up the new terminology, they too could avoid polemics and look forward to an irenic future when “no doubt most of us can (then) happily place ourselves somewhere in the golden middle.”¹

Events have proved otherwise. In Biblical studies, “maximalist” and “minimalist” have themselves become pejorative terms, and Assyriology has succumbed to similar polemics. I have reviewed the issues in two lengthy articles and need not go over the ground again here, except to repeat the definitions that I have arrived at: a maximalist is one who accepts all historical statements in the Bible (or, in the case of cuneiform, in literary sources even though later than the events they describe) as valid until and unless disproved by extra-Biblical evidence (in the case of cuneiform, by evidence contemporaneous with the events described); a minimalist is one who rejects all such statements until and unless confirmed by extra-Biblical sources (respectively sources contemporaneous with the events they describe).²

I find both the maximalist and the minimalist positions untenable. Although I can no longer invoke cuneiform historiography as a model of even-handedness for biblicists to emulate, I continue to hold that texts written contemporaneously with the events they describe present their own problems, whether of bias (especially in the case of royal monuments and other propagandistic products of royal chanceries) or of excessive conciseness (notably where archival documents are concerned). And, on the other hand, literary sources written long after the events they describe can be a precious complement to contemporaneous sources, which, given the paucity of other evidence, we cannot afford to reject out of hand; we must treat them critically but respectfully if we expect to reconstruct the history of pre-classical antiquity.

In yet another paper dealing with Mesopotamian historiography, I argue for (and illustrate) “a judicious approach to the reconstruction of ancient history where the evaluation of each (literary) source proceeds hand in hand with the probability of the results achieved.”³ A recent book defends the contrary position with equal vigor, contending that “literary texts … cannot and should not be used for the reconstruction of … events not otherwise attested.”⁴

Kenneth Kitchen weighs in on this great debate from the vantage point of Egyptology, the third major component of ancient Near Eastern history. An Egyptologist of unquestioned scholarly credentials, he is an admitted and unabashed maximalist, but one whose views demand a respectful hearing. In a blurb printed on the jacket of his new book, and widely reproduced by its publishers in their promotion of it, I wrote:

After decades of minimalism, it is refreshing to have this first systematic refutation from the opposite position. It provides a step-by-step review of the evidence for biblical history in its Near Eastern context by a leading authority equally at home in Egyptology as in the archaeology, history, and literature of ancient Western Asia. K.A. Kitchen writes with conviction and verve, not sparing those who are “factually disadvantaged” or who “do not do their Near Eastern homework.” He takes readers back through time like an archeologist digging a mound. Even those unwilling to follow him all the way down to the earliest strata will be able to use his lucid expositions and generous documentation to arrive at a balanced view of their own on some of the most burning issues of current biblical scholarship.

I stand by that (qualified) endorsement today. But rather than defend it in great detail here, let me single out, virtually at random, one paragraph from the book by way of illustration. Kitchen tells us:

A fact that is almost totally unknown to nearly all commentators on 2 Sam[uel] 8 to 1 Kings 11 is that 051the scale and nature of the wider realm of David and Solomon are not unique and belong to a specific period of history, namely ca. 1200–900 [B.C.E.]—neither earlier nor later. The evidence for this is strictly factual, mostly from sources hardly heard of by such commentators, but clear in its import. The limits are set by the demise of the great Egyptian and Hittite Late Bronze Age empires within 1200/1180 [B.C.E.], just before our period (introducing it), and by the rise and initial expansion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire within ca. 870–850 [B.C.E.] and onward, just following our period.

The quotation is admittedly taken from the beginning of the book, covering the later periods of Israelite history. But the point it makes could as well be illustrated (though Kitchen has not chosen to do so) from its more controversial later portions, where the author’s conclusions sometimes exceed the apparently compelling evidence of the facts he has so assiduously marshalled. For the same argument could also be used in favor of the plausibility of the Exodus, the desert wanderings and the conquest of the Promised Land if these alleged events can be dated to the beginnings of the collapse of the principal Late Bronze Age polities in the 13th and 12th centuries B.C.E. It could equally well be illustrated (though again Kitchen chose not to) at a slightly later time, that of the Divided Monarchy when, in the first half of the eighth century B.C.E., the northern kingdom of Israel under Jeroboam II and the southern kingdom of Judah under Azariah reached their maximum extent, nearly rivalling the Solomonic borders, precisely during a period of renewed Assyrian weakness immediately preceding the reign of King Tiglath-pileser III.⁵

To me all this suggests an important corollary to the syllogism that the fortunes of the great empires at the ends of the “Fertile Crescent” rise and fall together or, as I put it nearly 35 years ago, that “a measure of unity informs the grand themes underlying the vast panorama of ancient Near Eastern history; a common rhythm of successive crests and troughs punctuates historical developments throughout western Asia and Egypt.”⁶ The corollary holds that the fortunes of Israel and the rest of the Levant also rise and fall in accordance with that rhythm, but they do so in inverse proportion. Only when the extremities are in decline does the middle rise. It is relevant for Kitchen’s defense of the possible reality of the United Monarchy.

An even larger conclusion can be drawn from this example. Extra-Biblical evidence is not a necessary condition for validating Biblical evidence (so the minimalist position) though it may do so in the few instances of a virtual one-to-one correspondence, such as the Mesha Stele (or Moabite stone)^a and the Tell Dan^b inscription. Much more often, however, extra-Biblical material is a valid criterion for evaluating Biblical evidence, namely when it provides a historical setting that not only does not contradict the Biblical record (so the maximalist position) but in which the Biblical record makes good sense. That does not validate the Biblical record, but it creates the possibility for its positive evaluation.

Perhaps, then, it is time to offer a new alternative to the opposing sides. Between the extremes of maximalism and minimalism, there is a golden mean: to provide a context against which to test, not the validity, but the plausibility of the Biblical (and cuneiform and hieroglyphic) versions of events. It is often said that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Just so, certainty can be the nemesis of probability, even of possibility. In ancient history, whether Biblical or otherwise, we may have to settle for possibilities. Call this the contextual position if you will. Kitchen’s book can be read with profit as a thesaurus of contextual possibilities.

Kitchen Responds: I’m a Factualist

By Kenneth A. Kitchen

My thanks to Hershel Shanks and to his reviewers of my recent book, Ronald Hendel and William W. Hallo, for kindly allowing me to respond to their reviews, which I have read with lively interest and intellectual profit.

No surprise, Ron Hendel and I do differ! First, it must be objected that I do not “moonlight.” My contributions to the Near East are on a level with my Egyptology.⁷ My training and approaches are identical in both Egyptology and Near Eastern 052studies (including Biblical); the difference is that Biblical studies are out of date and out of step with all the rest. They incur my (sometimes sharp) criticism (Ron’s “bluster”!) for their almost fanatical devotion to 19th-century theories (illegitimately treated as fact), despite the immense tide of new knowledge and methods that should have swept such stuff into the garbage decades ago. In Biblical matters, pre-critical dogma is no part of my brief.

Ron is wrong when he accuses me of believing that Moses wrote the whole Pentateuch and Joshua wrote the Book of Joshua. So far as I recall, in over 50 years I have never once printed or spoken any such blanket claims. Joshua could not possibly have written the Book of Joshua personally (his death is noted in Joshua 24:29), nor does my book claim this. Moses did write things, and would pass for a major originator of much in the Pentateuch, but he did not sit down and write it just like it is today. Read it!

Proverbs 1–24 (not 25!) does claim to be from Solomon—and it is framed exactly like 40 or more other instructional wisdom-books between c. 2600 and the first centuries B.C., most with believable and actual originators; Ron Hendel is not in a position to prove otherwise.

The state of Isaiah is a complex one, and it has to be viewed from his time (c.700 B.C.), not ours. In 703, Assyria looked precarious, and Babylon was very active; to threaten a future captivity there then was not fantasy; Manasseh, in fact, was temporarily taken to Babylon (by King Esarhaddon). As I point out, other Cyruses existed before Cyrus II, the eventual fulfiller of the prophecy [of the Exiles’ return—Ed.]. There are many elements not compatible with the dominant view about Isaiah (see my book, pp. 378–380 with references not all conservative!), glossed-over by Hendel.

Contrary to Professor Hendel, I’m delighted to point out that (1) my book did not stem from fixed “prior convictions” of mine, nor (2) did I “desperately want” to establish anything in this book; and (3) the cited “passionate desire” (non-existent) was not “the motivation for this book.” I don’t think or work like that. This book came from exasperation: The recent Biblical “minimalists” were writing such arrant rubbish, factually speaking (for example, claiming the Tel Dan inscription and the Ekron stelae were fakes, even though they were excavated in professional excavations) that one knew it was wrong and that something sensible had to be done. Their precursors had been equally unreliable (going all the way back to 1802 [de Wette] and 1753 [Astruc]), so it seemed needful to sit back at ease and systematically put the record straight on an up-to-date basis. Theory must give way to facts when clashes come!

Also contrary to Hendel, I deserve raspberries for clear errors, but not for all and sundry. Nor do I consider my views as alone objective; they are only so when based on independent, observable facts. I regret having to criticize in my books Hendel’s efforts on the Patriarchs, but they simply do not take proper account of facts presented earlier, which cannot be ignored. So, on factual grounds, he must pay the price like the rest of us. “Ignorant” (with me) is a description, not a jibe, and simply means “not knowing the facts.”

My method is not just to collect and explain away. And my efforts on the Sinaitic/Moab covenant are not simplistic. They take careful account of the full history of more than 100 documents in some eight different languages through 2,000 years in form, content and context; within that immutable series, Sinai-Moab fits strictly within c. 1400–1180 B.C. (the outside limits), and vilification by Hendel cannot change this. Some six or seven verses in Deuteronomy are analogous to the treaties of Esarhaddon, but these verses are not thereby provenly borrowed therefrom; some Assyriologists would derive Esarhaddon’s curse-tradition from pre-existing West Semitic. And some Neo-Assyrian phraseology goes back a millennium or more. So this fig leaf is worthless.

My jaw drops in astonishment at Hendel’s seeming mockery of linguistic change, as suggested in Canaanite/early Hebrew from Moses’ time to (say) 600 B.C. Doesn’t he know that all languages (and spellings and scripts) change like so? In Egypt, Old-Egyptian > Middle-Egyptian > Late-Egyptian > Demotic > Coptic (c. 3000 B.C.-600 A.D.); in Mesopotamia, Old-Akkadian > Old Assyrian/Babylonian 053> Middle Assyrian/Babylonian > Neo-Assyrian/Late Babylonian (c. 3000 B.C.-c. 79 A.D.); in Anatolia, in 400 years, Old-Hittite > Middle Hittite > New Hittite; in cuneiform compare the Hittite Laws; in 700 years, we have cuneiform Luwian > “hieroglyphic Luwian” > Lycian (c. 13th-sixth centuries B.C.). “Airbrushing” is a universal phenomenon. Late Canaanite is glimpsed in the Amarna Letters and sundry Late Bronze epigraphs, as well as in Iron Age I arrowheads. Later still, we find it in “Canaanite”/earliest Hebrew (compare the Gezer calendar); still later, epigraphic Hebrew from the ninth-sixth centuries are close to classical Biblical Hebrew. The changes in those seven centuries or so are clear, but limited overall. So I am relying on observable facts, not inventing them.

The Patriarchs: Yes, libido exists at all periods, early (which I cited) as well as late. This presents no problem. But as the Exodus began from the eastern Delta, there is no reason whatever to assume that an Abram or Jacob ever got any further. My point on pharaonic abodes in the Delta being periodic still holds. Why does Hendel not check cited sources? The change in rules about tavern-keepers c. 1100 B.C. is not my invention; it comes out of good cuneiform sources discussed by D.J. Wiseman (a distinguished cuneiformist) seemingly unknown to Hendel.

Finally, God and theology. What has He (or also It) got to do with my book? Here, really muddled-up, Hendel cannot decide whether I’m a crypto-fundamentalist or a crypto-atheist! In fact I’m neither. Theology is NOT the subject of my book, and doesn’t belong in it (see p. 3). Label-mad, slogan-crazy Americans should stop trying to stick call-names on people! If that’s so necessary, I’m a verifiable factualist. I don’t fit the usual categories at all.

I chuckle at being labelled an atheist. I’m not one, but in a certain sense the book has to be. Precisely like my two previous ventures,⁸ this one is designed to cover the field of the Bible in its ancient environment in wholly material and intellectual terms. Just as when secular historians write histories of, for example, ancient Egypt, the Hittites or early Mesopotamia, they do not invoke a deity. So, in assessing the historical dimension of the Early (pre-classical) Hebrew records within the Hebrew Bible, I neither affirm nor deny the role of a deity as a possible factor, as it is, strictly, not open to proof/disproof. My books can be used by anyone, of firm beliefs or of none, and are intended to be. I’m dealing with tangible data, not with theological positions. That does have to be clearly understood. I oppose wrong theories not because they contradict the Bible or belief, but because they appear to be factually wrong under the spotlight of close examination. And both believers and the anti-God brigades can (and do) often “get it wrong” in various ways. My own faith is real, and it is both deep-anchored and broad-based; it can accommodate genuine change but has no time for nonsense masquerading as fact, no matter how eruditely disguised or how long it has misled people already.

With Professor Hallo, I probably have more in common. I feel I ought to apologize for involving him in the present debate. I am neither maximalist nor minimalist, but as I said, a verifiable factualist. If assessments are made of the writings in the Hebrew Bible, then I expect to be offered respectable data by way of factual backup and not just speculation. The latter may stimulate, but is of no inherent value without specific support. Thus I find myself sharing considerable common ground with Professor Hallo in his requirement that we treat our ancient sources seriously on the one hand, while on the other hand being alert to their individual limitations, biases, etc. Therefore I come very close to his carefully refined and stated position of a contextualist. One of the besetting sins of Biblical minimalism is its demands for mechanical, wholly unrealistic one-to-one verification of detailed points even in cases where this is impossible, no matter how good-quality the source being scrutinized may itself be. It is here that both Hallo and I would point to the wider (but often still characteristic) context as giving a realistic setting to Biblical narratives, institutions, events or people.

Hallo’s response on the rise and fall of major powers with time-spaces in between for lesser entities to expand and flourish for a season, I welcome. Besides the case of the Tarhuntassa, Carchemish, Aramaean and Davidic “mini-empires,” it indeed fits other cases well, such as the Uzziah/Jeroboam II epoch (of temporary Assyrian relapse) that he instances. On a much longer and wider canvas, I would then point again to the overall picture for several civilizations right across the ancient Near East for 3,000 years. After formative and crystallizing periods, every culture has had its longer history of undulation, “ups and downs.” What is true of the political history would also apply to other cultural features (art, literature, technology, etc.) although not necessarily in synchronism with politics. The whole matter, across breathtaking perspectives, is worth much more investigation; and I thank Professor Hallo for his further stimulus in such directions.

When we received a copy of Kenneth A. Kitchen’s new book, On the Reliability of the Old Testament, we knew that we should review it. Kitchen is one of the world’s leading scholars (he specializes in Egyptology), and the subject matter of the book—how historically accurate is the Bible?—is of central interest to many of our readers. We asked Ronald Hendel, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a columnist for our sister magazine, Bible Review, to review it for us.