Milestone: Kenneth A. Kitchen (1932–2025)
COURTESY KENNETH KITCHEN
Kenneth Kitchen was a giant in the field of Near Eastern studies. His interests spanned from Anatolia and South Arabia to Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, with Egypt being his passion.
Drawn at an early age to a love of Egyptian hieroglyphs, he enrolled at the University of Liverpool in 1951 to study Egyptology. By 1957, he was appointed lecturer in Egyptology, eventually becoming a professor in 1987. His dissertation, published as The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt (Arts & Phillips, 1973), was expanded in two subsequent editions and remains one of the standard works on the subject. But his greatest contribution is Ramesside Inscriptions (Blackwell, 1969–1990), a collection of all available texts from the 19th and 20th Dynasties. This herculean effort took 22 years to complete, resulting in seven published volumes of hand-written hieroglyphs.
Throughout his career, Kitchen was fascinated by how ancient texts and archaeology could contribute to the study and interpretation of the Bible.a His method is already evident in his early works, The Ancient Orient and the Old Testament (InterVarsity, 1966) and The Bible in Its World (Paternoster, 1977), while On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003) was a response to the resurgence of biblical minimalism in the 1980s and ’90s.b
A dedicated scholar, Kitchen always had time for others. He responded to thousands of letters over the years and was a gracious teacher who always encouraged younger scholars, as he did with me for 50 years.
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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.
MLA Citation
Footnotes
1. Kenneth A. Kitchen, “How We Know When Solomon Ruled,” BAR, September/October 2001.
2. See “The Kitchen Debate: Three Scholars Discuss a Major New Book on History and the Bible,” BAR, July/August 2005.