Hobby Lobby President to Return Ancient Artifacts

The objects—5,000 of which are described as ancient papyrus fragments, and 6,500 of which are clay—lack proper paperwork to document their provenance, which means they could be stolen. The items will now be given to the respective governments of Iraq and Egypt. 

Green had previously been bullish about his museum’s ownership of the objects, but recently admitted his ever-evolving understanding of the world of artifact collecting has been turned on its head during this process. 

“One area where I fell short was not appreciating the importance of the provenance of the items I purchased,” Green told the Washington Post last week. He admitted that when his collecting career began in 2009, he “knew little about the world of collecting… the criticism of the museum resulting from my mistakes was justified.”

The items were allegedly purchased by Green from three dealers representing an Israeli family in a 2010 deal that took place in the United Arab Emirates. It happened despite an artifacts expert the Hobby Lobby president retained cautioning against the vague origin story provided by the dealers at the time. 

Sitting just two blocks away from the National Mall, the Museum of the Bible opened in November 2017. It was a $500 million construction project, and the latest news isn’t the only time the private organization has been in the museum community’s crosshairs: In 2018, it was revealed that several documents purported to be Dead Sea Scrolls were, in fact, forgeries. Then there was the case of the 13 biblical fragments the Green family obtained from an Oxford professor that were later determined to have been stolen from the University’s Oxyrhynchus Collection. Those fragments were returned in 2019.

The latest story of the artifacts that will be returned to Iraq and Egypt first came to light just months prior to the museum’s opening, when in July 2017 it was reported that Hobby Lobby paid $3 million to settle a lawsuit brought on by the U.S. government that stated the retail giant had illegally smuggled several thousand ancient Iraqi artifacts into the U.S. after labeling them “ceramic tile samples.” 

Of the pieces being returned, it is said the only one of them was ever on display at the Museum of the Bible.