Is the Old Testament historically reliable, or mostly fiction and legend concocted to buttress Jewish nationalism -- or something in between?

In this long-running debate, skepticism has recently gained ground in academic circles. Now a British authority has launched a vigorous defense of the Old Testament's historical credibility against the doubts disseminated by liberal scholars and popular books.

"On the Reliability of the Old Testament" (Eerdmans) provides the most sweeping scholarly case in a generation for the traditional beliefs held by Orthodox Jews and Christian conservatives.

Author K.A. Kitchen is professor emeritus of Egyptology at England's University of Liverpool. Because his views are academically unfashionable, he feels a need to immodestly mention his facility in a dozen ancient languages and the half-century he has spent studying the relevant texts.

The book was planned as a counterpart to "The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?" by now-deceased Professor F.F. Bruce, a conservative classic reissued in paperback last year. But the problems are more complex and the case more elaborate.

And Kitchen is more polemical than Bruce, castigating liberal writings with such terms as "willful evasion of very clear evidence," "without a particle of foundation in fact," "palpably false," "totally misleading," "trendy nonsense," "self-delusion," "sloppy scholarship," "immense ignorance," "agenda-driven drivel," "pure, unadulterated fantasy," "lunacy" and "crude anti-biblical (almost anti-Semitic) propaganda."

Kitchen assails radical "minimalists" who dismiss the Old Testament as mostly fictional. But he also targets Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, who finds some factual material in the Jewish Bible (see his co-written "The Bible Unearthed") and the University of Arizona's William Dever, who finds somewhat more in "What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?" and "Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?"

It will be fascinating to see how proponents of well-entrenched liberal views reply to Kitchen -- and more fascinating if they don't reply.

Much of Kitchen's case is summarized in three words: "Some manuscripts, please!" He repeatedly complains that liberal theories ignore or distort the actual evidence from ancient texts.

Another Kitchen theme is that the doubters rely heavily upon "negative evidence," the lack of ancient remains and non-biblical texts that would absolutely prove biblical accounts. Kitchen says this lack "proves absolutely nothing" except that artifacts from thousands of years ago often didn't survive.

Archaeologists haven't found hard evidence left behind from the 40 years of wilderness wanderings after the Exodus, for instance, but Kitchen says that doesn't prove the Israelites weren't there.

Given the many gaps in records outside Scripture, Kitchen necessarily supports the Bible with circumstantial evidence from his knowledge of Egyptian and other ancient materials.

"Implicit or indirect evidence can be equally powerful when used aright," he argues, and it's fair to judge the Bible's plausibility by comparisons with other events in the same era.

Thus he presents arrays of ancient treaties, inscriptions, trade routes, treasure troves, political systems and biological data, and says many more examples could be piled atop those in this book.

Kitchen urges readers to closely watch what the Bible actually says. For instance, he notes, doubts raised about the "conquest" under Joshua often distort the Bible's own report that Israel only gradually infiltrated the Holy Land. Similarly, David's kingdom was not like the grand centralized empires of modern times.

In terms of "general reliability," he concludes, the Old Testament "comes out remarkably well, so long as its writings and writers are treated fairly and evenhandedly, in line with independent data, open to all."

Drawbacks: Readers could use a heftier introduction and may be confused by the reverse order in treating events, moving from the Babylonian Exile backward to Genesis.