Kenneth Kitchen, Personal and Brunner Professor Emeritus of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool, died on 6 February aged 92. His formal title does little to sum up this remarkable man.
As well as being one of the world’s leading authorities on the Ramesside kings and Egyptian chronology, Ken, as he liked to be known, was one of very few people in the world who could read Ancient South Arabian and a whole host of other languages once spoken in the Ancient Middle East – Akkadian, Aramaic, Coptic, Elamite, Hebrew, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Phoenician, Sumerian, and Ugaritic.
It was his conversion through the ministry of Leith Samuel at the Liverpool University Christian Union in 1951 that was to change the course of his life. Thereafter Ken ventured boldly into Old Testament scholarship bringing to bear his vast knowledge of surrounding civilisations to argue against minimalist views prevalent in current academia.
Ken, a bachelor, lived frugally in a modest suburban house surrounded by his 20,000 books. He had dozens of projects on the go, some of which he never finished. Three of his books dealt with the Old Testament and its wider world: Ancient Orient and the Old Testament, The Bible in its World and On the Reliability of the Old Testament – the latter mischievously abbreviated to ‘O Rot!’ by Ken, doubtless anticipating the reaction of his minimalist critics.
But arguably his greatest legacy was his three-volume 5½kg work Treaty, Law and Covenant in the Ancient Near East. By comparing the covenants preserved in Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy with roughly contemporary ancient treaties, Ken showed that these Biblical covenants were authentic late-second-millennium-BC compositions.
However, Ken was more than just a bookish academic; he corresponded with his friends and colleagues around the world, cataloguing their replies with a numerical cipher. He had reached 60,000 such replies when dementia kicked in and he was forced to spend the last four years of his life in care.
We will not see the like of him again.
