BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Milestones: Kenneth A. Kitchen (1932–2025)

Leading Egyptologist who connected Egyptian and biblical history

Kenneth A. Kitchen was a giant in the field of Near Eastern studies. His academic interests spanned the languages and histories of the entire Near East, from Anatolia and South Arabia to Mesopotamia and across the Fertile Crescent, with Egyptology being his passion and primary focus. Throughout his career, he was also fascinated by how ancient texts, iconography, and archaeology could contribute to the study and interpretation of the Bible.

Born in Scotland where he lived for the first decade of his life, Kitchen moved to England after the horrors of World War II. As a youth, he began reading about the ancient Orient but was smitten by Egypt: “I … was strongly drawn to the hieroglyphs of Egypt,” as he wrote in his autobiography.ⁱ Indeed, his childhood diaries include beautifully drawn hieroglyphs, an indication of the world-class epigrapher he would become. Young Ken saw a picture of the eminent Egyptologist James Henry Breasted standing by an inscribed coffin towards which he pointed his cane, reading the signs. The 17-year-old told his parents, “That’s what I want to do!”ⁱⁱ

With that goal in mind, he enrolled at the University of Liverpool in 1951 to study with the distinguished Egyptologist Herbert Fairman. Hebrew was also part of his curriculum, along with the archaeology, history, and languages of Egypt and the ancient Near East. By 1957, while working on his doctoral thesis, he was appointed to be a lecturer in Coptic and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. He stayed on at Liverpool and, 30 years later, became a professor of Egyptology. He published his dissertation under the title The Third Intermediate Period in Egypt, 1100–650 BC (Arts & Phillips, 1973), which was expanded in two subsequent editions and remains one of the standard works on the subject. But his greatest contribution is his 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 and 15 trips to Egypt to collate texts, ultimately resulting in seven published volumes consisting of 5,220 pages of hand-written hieroglyphs! Seven volumes of translations followed between 1991 and 2014.

Kitchen believed that studying a subject requires the consideration of all relevant materials from all periods. He held, for example, that based on comparisons with ancient Near Eastern treaty texts, the Sinaitic covenant found in the Hebrew Bible (Exodus 20ff.; Deuteronomy) was structured like Hittite texts from the late second millennium BC. To make his case, he assembled more than 100 treaty documents and law codes, from third-millennium Sumer to first-century BC Rome. The 1,000-page tome—Treaty, Law and Covenant (Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014)—included transliterations of the texts and their translations. Two volumes of analysis completed the project.

Kitchen was a strong advocate of the contextual approach to the Old Testament, i.e., studying the ancient Hebrew texts against the background provided by archaeological data. His method is evident from the title of his early works The Ancient Orient and the Old Testament (InterVarsity, 1966) and The Bible in its World (Paternoster, 1977). On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003) was a response to the resurgence of historical minimalism in the 1980s and ’90s. Kitchen also mastered Old South Arabian inscriptions, leading to the publication of four volumes in that field. His authoritative work on Egyptian chronology continues to be cited by historians and archaeologists.

Kitchen’s love affair with scholarship meant it was his vocation and avocation. Nevertheless, he always had time for friends and students. He responded to more than 60,000 personal letters over the years and was a gracious and genuine teacher and colleague who always encouraged younger scholars, as he did with me for 50 years. He was one of a kind.

James K. Hoffmeier is Emeritus Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School of Trinity International University. He led the excavations at Tell el-Borg in Sinai from 2000 to 2008.

Notes

i. In Sunshine & Shadow (Liverpool: Abercromby Press, 2016), p. 65
ii. In Sunshine & Shadow, 65.

All-Access members, read Kenneth A. Kitchen’s contributions to BAR

The Kitchen Debate

How We Know When Solomon Ruled

The Desert Tabernacle

The Patriarchal Age: Myth or History?