Professor Kenneth A. Kitchen (1932–2025)

Kenneth Anderson Kitchen was a phenomenon, one of a kind, and I felt very privileged to know him. He was someone with a vast knowledge of the ancient world. For parts of his life, he may have been the person who had read a greater variety of ancient Near and Middle Eastern texts than anyone in the entire world.

He was a renowned Egyptologist, and an authority on Ramesside Egypt (Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, 1295–1069 BC). He also wrote the most authoritative chronology of the Third Intermediate Period in Egypt.

His copious publications speak for themselves, but I would like to give a flavour of the man I knew. I must have first come to know Ken, as he was widely known, through his visits to Tyndale House, his attendance at the Tyndale Fellowship, and his attendance at the Society for Old Testament Study. Having struck up a friendship with each other, he became a frequent correspondent. His missives to me were more frequent than mine to him, usually coming in his almost-indecipherable handwriting, though occasionally typed.

Ken was absolutely animated by the ancient world and by the Bible, and would share his learning generously, as well as express forthright opinions about scholarship of which he disapproved. He viewed many biblical scholars as ‘factually challenged’. They were operating at a disadvantage because they knew so little, having scarcely read much of the writing and literature of the ancient world.

Not only had Ken copied out by hand about 6,000 pages of Ramesside Inscriptions, but he had also published three volumes of South Arabian inscriptions, written on Hurrian poetry, and could also read languages including Akkadian, Aramaic, Coptic, Elamite, Hebrew, Hittite, Luwian, Phoenician, Sumerian, and Ugaritic—essentially all the languages of the ancient Near East, famous or otherwise.

He was a workaholic, who could process vast amounts of texts and publish at speed. He would work for six days per week, dividing each day into sections for different projects, and then take Sunday as his Sabbath.

Born in Aberdeen, Ken Kitchen would remind people that despite his northern-English accent, he was technically a Scot. He had known from about the age of nine that he wanted to study Egyptology, and at university had been told he had to study Hebrew alongside Egyptology. Ken had become a Christian shortly before that through the ministry of Leith Samuel at the Evangelical Christian Union, but he said that he was reading bits of the Bible in Hebrew before he became aware that what he was reading actually was the Bible!

Kitchen lived a life of incredible discipline and simplicity in the house in Woolton, Liverpool, that he and his parents bought when he was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Liverpool. His abode was a small three-bedroom terraced house, without central heating or any modern appliance. He was very proud that nothing was connected to the internet so there could be no possibility of a virus destroying his work.

But Ken had one area in which he was not at all frugal: buying books. Imagine such a house packed with over 20,000 books on the ancient world. You walk in the entrance, flanked by books. The front room on your right is full of books, stacked double. The next small room on your right was where he wrote and entertained, again covered with books, stacked double. The only other room downstairs was a ‘kitchen’. But Ken Kitchen basically didn’t have a kitchen: it was a tiny box room. Ken lived all his life without a refrigerator. He had milk delivered fresh, and had no need for the complexities of unnecessary equipment. He lived in the utmost simplicity.

I once went upstairs. Every room was full of books and more books. There was one place in his bedroom where an area of the wall was covered by a curtain. I thought, surely that must be where he keeps his clothes. Ken drew back the curtain. More books! Then I remembered that Ken lived so simply that he didn’t waste space on unnecessary sets of clothes. He usually wore a tie and had quite a number of these. In fact on one occasion he even gave a public lecture wearing a significant number of ties simultaneously, which was one of the many things he laughed about.

There was one more striking thing I noticed in his house, and that was a pile of envelopes. The top envelope had a number on it, which I remember was a five-digit number beginning with the number 6. I asked what it was. He replied that he had numbered every single piece of non-junk mail that he had received in his entire life. He was now at over sixty-thousand. He took me out to his garage, the old wooden door of which seemed to be repaired with some sort of duct tape. Therein lay his stores of old correspondence. His life was completely organised.

It was from this life of discipline that he was able to be so learned and so productive. He would often look at his watch and ask, ‘How is the enemy doing?’ The ‘enemy’, of course, was time. When he was about 70, he told me of the forty years’ worth of books he still felt he needed to write. He had big ideas about the patterns in which empires and kingdoms rose and fell, which could only be written by someone with his wide reading. Many of these projects will not now be completed.

But Ken Kitchen’s impact will definitely endure. He obviously has inspired and taught many Egyptologists. He taught at Liverpool University for many decades, and for most of these had the late Alan R. Millard as his dear friend and colleague. They made a great pair: Ken the outspoken Egyptologist, and his cautious, understated, and also very learned colleague Alan, both also committed Christians and members of the Tyndale Fellowship. Appreciation by Ken’s colleagues is shown in the collection of 46 essays edited by Mark Collier and Steven R. Snape, Ramesside Studies in Honour of K. A. Kitchen (Rutherford Press, 2011), but Ken will also be widely remembered for his famous interventions in Old Testament studies. The first major intervention was his book Ancient Orient and Old Testament (Intervarsity, 1966), in which he made the case that information from the ancient world suggested that many parts of the Old Testament were earlier and more reliable than many scholars had thought. Later in life he brought out On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2003), which is still the best single resource to make this case. With Paul Lawrence he also edited the three volume work Treaty, Law, and Covenant (Harrassowitz, 2012), showing how treaty structures could be shown to change over time. Ken had a lecture he liked to give on how this showed that the book of Deuteronomy must belong to the second millennium BC.

Ken’s forthright positions were not equally appreciated by all. But even those who didn’t like his conclusions had to admit his learning. He regularly attended the Society for Old Testament Study, and though it was not until late in his life that he was invited to give his maiden lecture there, he would often give a bit of a speech at the end of someone else’s paper pointing out some aspect of the ancient world which he thought the speaker had overlooked. At these times he could be very earnest, but for those of us who got to know him, we saw a tremendous sense of humour and much personal kindness and tenderness.

Despite his great learning, Ken Kitchen was a man of a deep and simple faith in Jesus Christ as his Saviour and Lord. Though he knew a lot, he was also humble and aware of his own fallibility and frailty. He would want us in remembering him to think of the One he served. As I think about Ken’s life, as a bachelor living a life of ascetic discipline and dedication to scholarship, I find myself challenged by his work ethic and his incredible focus, even as I recognise that Ken was one of a kind. We will not see the like of him again.