The Greens’ New Deal
How The Museum of the Bible’s Illicit Acquisitions Impact Biblical Studies
In recent weeks, a story broke that had all the makings of a particularly bad Harrison Ford or Nicolas Cage movie: Dirk Obbink, a professor at Oxford who at one point had been tasked with editing the papers of the Egypt Exploration Society was accused of stealing some of its manuscripts and selling them to the Museum of the Bible. In some ways, this is a story with deep roots. Like everyone else, when the news came out a couple of years ago that Hobby Lobby was trafficking in black market antiquities, my first thought was that, if you went to a Hobby Lobby, past the fake gourds and pumpkins, across from the crafty letters that you could paint and display, you just might find a cuneiform tablet. This, of course, was not what actually happened. Instead, the family that owns Hobby Lobby, the Green Family — who, in 2014, as the above link notes, sued to be allowed to deny their employees access to birth control on religious grounds — also owns the new Museum of the Bible, in Washington, D.C., which is where these smuggled artifacts were bound.
Of course, I have no way of knowing exactly how culpable the Museum of the Bible, or the Green family, is for the latest blemish on both of their reputations. In theory, if an Oxford professor showed up at my museum claiming to have manuscripts to sell — presumably, in this imaginaire, rare texts relating to how the 2006 Miami Heat illegally stole the NBA championship from the Dallas Mavericks — I would have no reason to doubt them.
What is certain, however, and what everybody should know about the Greens, the Museum, and Hobby Lobby is that they have not earned anyone’s benefit of the doubt. They do not ask enough questions, they do not care nearly enough about where the stuff they buy comes from. Just a little while ago, it turned out, as Andrew Henry observed in this 2018 article, that fully five “Dead Sea Scroll fragments” displayed in the museum turned out to be likely forgeries. It can be very hard to tell the difference between real scrolls and fake scrolls. It is, of course, even harder if you are not trying very hard to tell the difference.
Why does this particular theft, or kind of theft, or forgery, or ill-advised acquisitiveness matter? The basic answer is that we have shockingly little with which to reconstruct what ancient biblical texts actually looked like, in a word-for-word kind of way, and manuscripts and manuscript fragments are the clues we have to reconstruct them. I am, for the most part, a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, which is the scholarly name for the book more often known as the Old Testament — since, after all, the adjective “Old” is meant to signify its relationship to the “New” Testament which did not exist when it first appeared, and which it was not composed to introduce. We think we know more or less what Jesus, say, would have read, if he came into possession of a physical Hebrew Bible, but there is a lot of room in “more or less” for small but important changes.
Consider this. One of the first questions I always ask my students in classes that are intended to introduce the Hebrew Bible as a text is when they think the very oldest complete Hebrew manuscript of the Bible dates from. Nobody has ever come close to guessing the correct answer (about a thousand years old). The Codex Leningradensis is from about 1008 and it is the basis for all contemporary Hebrew Bibles today. Another thing I tell my students that usually surprises them: absolutely no non-biblical texts survive from ancient Israel from the same time period in which the Hebrew Bible was actually in a state of active composition. There are a few inscriptions, most short, and the most important ones are not Israelite at all but Moabite and Aramean. There are no narratives, no chronicles, no palace records, no ship manifests, alien or otherwise. If you follow me, since there is no Hebrew Bible manuscript either, there are in fact almost no texts or manuscripts at all from the biblical period — we just assume, probably correctly, that the Hebrew Bible was, in fact, from that ancient period. We truly can’t prove it, or come close to proving it — isn’t that weird?
Here we find the transcendent importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which, in most cases, contain the earliest surviving Hebrew manuscripts of biblical texts. Some fragments survive from earlier periods of a verse or two, here and there, but the comprehensive nature of the Dead Sea Scrolls is sharply different from anything we have from previous centuries. The community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls through the last three centuries BCE lived and worked after the major eras of biblical composition, and for some of these well after, but this is still, of course, quite an early set of texts. The Dead Sea Scrolls do not represent a “complete Hebrew manuscript” for a variety of reasons. The “books” that we have found were found separately from each other, sealed up tight in jars, and alongside other non-biblical manuscripts that, for all we know, might have been part of this community’s “Bible” equally as much. Yet fragments of every book in the Hebrew Bible except for the book of Esther have been found at the site, so at least we know that some version of every book besides Esther already existed, which is a very important point.
What these scrolls and other evidence tell us is that, even a few centuries after the main books and main traditions of the Hebrew Bible were in basically familiar shape, the exact wording of many different verses was still in flux; there are small but sometimes significant differences between the surviving Dead Sea Scrolls and the Codex Leningradensis, as there are between the Codex and the other major early set of biblical manuscripts: various parts of the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of the Bible. These differences may even indicate that different groups had certain ideological distinctions that were shaped by, or shaped, those textual differences. For example: in the most famous case, the still-surviving people known as the Samaritans possess their own Torah — the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, not the entire Hebrew Bible — supposedly authored by Moses and called the “Samaritan Pentateuch,” and among its key differences, it describes YHWH’s whole mountain not as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem but instead a mountain called Mt. Gerizim, to the north. Today, Gerizim remains the center of Samaritan worship in the way that Jerusalem remains the center of Jewish worship.
The difference between the Samaritan and Jewish versions of the Torah are likely indicative of a broader set of differences among various communities, including the Dead Sea Scroll community, that existed in the last centuries BCE and likely beyond. There appears, therefore, to be kind of a long time between when the basic Hebrew Bible formed and when an absolutely set, canonical text appeared. And our only window into that still poorly understood period? Manuscripts.
When a museum accepts, and therefore lends its authority to, a fake manuscript because it didn’t ask enough questions, that action has the capacity to send all scholarship on the subject down the wrong path. When a museum accepts a real but stolen manuscript the same is true, and not only because it muddies the waters of what is real and not real. Obviously, a criminal must cover up the evidence of their crime. In Obbink’s case, he allegedly removed records and photographs from the Egypt Exploration Society’s holdings in order to cover up what he had done and obviously, in the process, removed crucial information about the finds from the public record. Taking away from the extremely slim evidence we currently have is no better than confusing us with respect to what evidence exists.
Beyond that, an institution such as the Museum of the Bible simply does not have the best interest of biblical scholars — or anyone who is interested in a particularly accurate picture — at heart, as has been well covered in a couple of recent efforts by biblical scholars, notably Jill Hicks-Keeton and Cavan Concannon’s recent collection of essays by a number of different experts, as well as Joel Baden and Candida Moss’s earlier study of other efforts by the Green family to advance their religious agenda.
Since the Greens have this agenda, and advance it forcefully through their museum, the manuscripts that are so vital to scholarly work are generally displayed to the general public in a way that misstates their significance and misrepresents what they actually are. Who can access a museum’s holdings and study them is always an important question for the advancement of human knowledge, and gatekeepers who want to stress certain interpretations over others inhibit crucial scholarly research. Basically, the Green Family, and the Museum’s efforts to depict the Hebrew Bible as a sacred object of Christianity, is not a good fit for a text that was largely completed — though again not in all its details — before anybody had even heard of Judaism. Indeed, as I discuss with my students most class days, there are significant issues keeping scholars from thinking about the Hebrew Bible as a contemporary religious text at all, since it was composed neither for Judaism nor Christianity, but for ancient Israelites, and really for ancient Judahites — which is to say, for the people of the kingdom-then-region called Judah, which separated from Israel before the end of the tenth century BCE (if it had ever been part of a unified kingdom at all). The Bible was completed, and largely composed in this Judah, much of it after Israel had already been conquered by the Assyrians, so that it is complicated to even describe it as an Israelite book. There’s not room to say much more about Israel, but the contemporary nation’s place in modern evangelical thought, and therefore in maintaining the integrity of its biblical charter myth, forbids a serious consideration of these and other important matters.
In short, in trying to create a Museum of the Bible, the Greens have been unscrupulous and careless in collecting artifacts thereof. They have muddied the water that we desperately need to be clear because there are so few fish in it to begin with, and we are very hungry. Even a scrupulous Museum of the Bible constructed through the religious commitments that brought you Burwell v. Hobby Lobby would not be very good, and certainly not very informative. They could, however, at least try a little bit to collect real artifacts that are also actually for sale and not stolen. Honest mistakes, not so surprisingly, happen somewhat less often to people who make a little effort to avoid them, as the Museum never has, and may not in the future.
As for Obbink, if he is proven to have done what he is accused of doing, the seemingly lurid nature of the crime will owe to the tinge of the mysterious that surrounds all such objects as these — ancient manuscripts, scrolls, different versions of biblical texts. The term “Dead Sea Scrolls” itself surely conjures up something out of a Dan Brown novel. The reality, however, is more mundane: the theft, the thief, and the museum together, in the guise of pursuing and presenting knowledge to the general public, have thrown up significant roadblocks to maintaining even the knowledge we already have. By diminishing our meager stores in taking from collections, by creating confusion about what has been discovered and what it means, thefts like these leave a legacy of confusion that may be impossible to dispel.
Andrew Tobolowsky is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary. He has been to the Museum of the Bible and was not particularly impressed with what they have done with what they have.
