I am a professor of art crimes. I spent many decades researching criminal cases throughout history and the world to teach my students about cultural heritage crimes like fraud, forgery, and looting. This was, quite frankly, a waste of time. You can learn almost everything about heritage crime from looking at the Museum of the Bible's activities in the last few years.
After September's transfer of the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet from Iraq, Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby's crafting superstore empire, has again made the District of Columbia museum a hot topic. This 3,500-year-old cuneiform tablet inscribed with part of The Epic of Gilgamesh was one of many antiquities similar to those smuggled out of Iraq during the chaotic 1990s. It was complete with a letter proving it had left Iraq in 1981 when the tablet ended up at Christies. The letter was a fake, and it was quite bad. This became evident when Iraq and the Department of Justice began asking questions of both Hobby Lobby as well as Christies, after the tablet was purchased by the auction house for $1,674,000 in 2014.
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The Greens are a powerful player in the evangelical world. Their museum seems to be designed to show its visitors that the Bible is historical accurate and literal truth. Commentators on the right have suggested, with different degrees of coherence over the years that harsh criticism of Hobby Lobby or the Museum of the Bible must have been motivated by anti-Christian bias. This is similar to saying that John Wayne Gacy's criticisms reveal an intolerance of clowns.
It makes it look more like you were on a crime spree than just a shopping spree by releasing 99 percent of your antiquities purchase because they were most likely looted.
Let me explain. Customs officers inspected boxes that were being shipped from the United Arab Emirates in 2010 to three Hobby Lobbys corporate offices in Oklahoma. The boxes contained ancient Near Eastern artifacts, not clay tiles (sample), as claimed by the shipping labels. The feds were able to seize about 3,800 cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals from Hobby Lobby, and then repatriate them to Iraq. Green also gave Iraq 8,106 more antiquities that he purchased for the museum. He also returned to Egypt approximately 5,000 papyrus fragments, as it was impossible to determine if these items had left their country legally.
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It is difficult to keep track of all the repatriations due to the changing legal identities of who purchased, held, and gave away the artifacts. This includes the Museum of the Bible or Hobby Lobby. I will refer to them interchangeably for simplicity's sake, as they are closely intertwined, as Joel Baden and Candida Moss demonstrated in the book Bible Nation. Hobby Lobby, owned entirely by the Green family began buying artifacts to donate to the museum's planned museum in 2009. Hobby Lobby was able to deduct tax for charitable donations due to the legal separation of the entities, increasing Greens profits. As Matt Pearce, a reporter for Hobby Lobby, joked in 2017, you can think of the museum simply as a Hobby Lobby robber hobby.
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The museum stated in 2016 that it would only keep antiquities from its collection if there was sufficient documentation. This didn't leave much. Hobby Lobby purchased more than 16,900 antiquities from 2009 to create its public collections database. There is only one cuneiform text, 15 fragments of papyrus, and 10 other bits and pieces. The museum's galleries fill in the gaps between its antiquities by loaning, replicas and showing videos of biblical sites on screens. The whole place looks like Nicolas Cages' private museum in the National Treasure films. Dramatic lighting is provided by large sconces and random columns.
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It makes it look more like you were on a crime spree than a shopping spree by releasing 99 percent of your antiquities purchase because they were most likely looted. The museum wants you to forget about it being so naive. Green claimed that he had trusted the wrong people and dealt with unscrupulous dealers unwittingly. The New York Times sympathizes with the museum, describing it as having to repatriate antiquities without proper paperwork.
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Although it is true that the Museum of the Bible does not have supervillains rappelling down from the skylights to steal cultural treasures, the Museum of the Bible didn't just happen to be a victim of the black market. Patty Gerstenblith, a noted cultural heritage specialist, was consulted by the Greens when they first began their shopping spree. Gerstenblith is someone I know. Do not let Patty fool your eyes; she is formidable and knowledgeable and knows exactly what is right and wrong. She should have put the fear of God in the Greensor at the very least the fear of Department of Justice. Instead, they have made her warnings about not doing things into a checklist of ways to evade the law.
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A few apologists also claimed that the museum had fully cooperated in federal investigations into the Dream Tablet, and falsely labeled antiquities shipment shipments. While this might be true, Hobby Lobby tried to convince Egypt and Iraq to give up their rights. In 2020, I was sent a leaked copy by Hobby Lobby to Iraq's ministry of culture. Candida Moss wrote about it for The Daily Beast. The agreement included promises to return the Dream Tablet, and other antiquities, to Iraq, in exchange for the right to loan some of the antiquities and a complete waiver of any claims that Iraq could have against the museum and its donors (e.g. Hobby Lobby or the Greens). The company tried to negotiate with a chip that it did not have. In 2019, the feds had already taken the Dream Tablet. The museum was forced to admit it couldn't reach the agreements because both Egypt and Iraq refused to allow them to continue drawing in people and gaining academic legitimacy through their illegal purchases.
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You would think that the museum takes a proactive approach when it comes to issues of provenance. The museum's description of the 2020 return to the Greek Orthodox Church of a manuscript is enough to make you cry. It also describes the curator's extensive scholarly research to link the manuscript to the World War I lootings of a monastery in Greece. The museum fails to mention that Princeton University sued this church in 2018 for failing to return another manuscript stolen from the same monastery. The museum was forced to repatriate the manuscript after an outsider scholar noticed its marks.
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After a Greek researcher discovered it, another stolen manuscript was returned to the University of Athens by the museum in 2018. The museum managed the negotiations well enough to loan the manuscript. Another notable case was when the Greens purchased 150 fragments of papyrus from Dirk Obbink in 2010,13. This professor most likely stole the papyrus from the Oxford University collection. While museum staffers began questioning Obbbink's source of the papyri in 2016, Hobby Lobby demanded that he refund the money they paid for one of their 2017 purchases. However, it wasn't until 2019, when the Greens got in touch to the Oxford collections leaders to express their suspicions. This was well after alarming scholars. Hobby Lobby sued Obbink last month. The museum appears to have adopted a more catch-and-release strategy to collecting rather than the meticulous, thorough approach that the antiquities market requires. It grabbed what it could and let go when the authorities were likely to notice.
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The museum has not always been able to acquire stolen or looted antiquities. It sometimes also tries to fake things! The museum first opened in 2017 and displayed cracked fragments made of leather inked with biblical text as an example of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls. A placard indicated that scientists had begun to question the authenticity of the leather fragments. The museum removed five fragments in 2017 and then took them down in 2020.
The museum claimed that it conducted a wide range of tests. However, only one glance under a microscope was enough to see that fragments of ink had penetrated into the leather. The leather may be old, but the text on it is not. The delay in announcing results was important. It allowed the Greens to keep the tax deduction of likely multimillion-dollars for donating fragments to the museum.
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The Greens used some of their wealth from crafting to finance scholarly research on Aramaic incantation Bowls in other collections. Experts believe they were looted mostly from Iraq. They also funded what experts called an illegal excavation in the West Bank by a Biblical pseudo-archeologist, who previously attempted to dig for Noah's Ark.
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You can see what I mean when I say that I am able to teach whole classes on heritage crime using only the Museum of the Bible. This list is extensive, but I suspect it's incomplete. Baden and Moss have discussed the museum's use of nondisclosure agreement, which may be hindering scholars from reporting on other problems. The museum doesn't mind threatening journalists. The museum holds an ancient Hebrew prayer book that was allegedly stolen from Afghanistan's National Museum of Afghanistan in mid-1990s. Although the museum's website states that it is still investigating the claim, Jeffrey Kloha (chief curatorial officer) told a Jerusalem Post reporter in April 2021 that the museum would consider legal action if they published an article on the matter.
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The museum hopes to tell a story about inerrancy and the Bible. It is hoped that the Bible will open and reveal what we are reading. This could be done by flipping it open. Cuneiform tablets are supposed to show that writing was possible at Abraham's time, so he could have written down his experiences. The Dead Sea Scrolls, and papyri containing scraps from the New Testament, were meant to prove that the biblical text has been preserved in its original form since it was written. The Greens sought to show that God's Word has not been hampered by human weakness. Scholars know that this text has been modified over time. The Greens' infallibility has been proven time and again.
