On the Reliability of the Old Testament (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids and Cambridge, 2003: ISBN 0-8028-4960-1) is a book by British Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen (born 1932).
The book provides the reader with "the most sweeping scholarly case in a generation for the traditional beliefs held by Orthodox Jews and Christian conservatives", according to Richard Ostling.
[1] The book opens with an introductory chapter surveying the history with which it intends to deal, the continuous narrative in the Hebrew Bible from the Genesis creation narrative to the return of the Jews to Jerusalem from the Babylonian captivity in the early days of the Persian Empire in the 5th century BC.
He clarifies by stating that there are three elements he means to address, history, literature and culture, and three he does not, theology, doctrine, and dogma.
[2] In chapter 10, despite supporting the historicity of the Bible, Kitchen also criticizes biblical archaeology as it was conceived in the first half of the 20th century, particularly the works of William Foxwell Albright and Cyrus Herzl Gordon, whom he dismisses as "little local (and very parochial)" representatives of the "long-deceased American Biblical Archaeology/theology school".