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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 For Kitchen, historical reliability is defined as that which is authentic and has significant historical content and value.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...