Is Bible Museum Tainted By Hobby Lobby Antiquities Smuggling Scandal?
The arts and crafts giant Hobby Lobby will pay a $3 million fine and return over 5,500 Biblical artifacts smuggled out of Iraq.
But art crime and archaeological scholars say that the consequences from the scandal have only just begun.
Hobby Lobby president Steve Green sits on the board of the Bible Museum, an $800 million project set to open this year on the National Mall in Washington D.C.
The museum released a statement insisting that none of the items acquired by Hobby Lobby were intended to be housed or displayed in the museum. But those who have closely followed the museum’s development have called that claim into question.
Even more importantly, the scandal is focusing new attention on other artifacts in the museum collection and how they were obtained.
“The fact is, they’re not as separate as they claim,” Candida Moss, the co-author of a forthcoming book on the Green family, told the Washington Post.“Many of the artifacts will be on loan from the Green collection. There are other items in their collection that scholars are asking questions about.”
Contact Jesse Bernstein at bernstein@forward.com or on Twitter @__jbernstein
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
