Museum of the Bible, Hobby Lobby, Antiquities Smuggling, Ancient Coins

The Washington, DC Museum of the Bible is set to open in November, 2017.

The museum is owned by the wealthy Green family of Oklahoma, which owns the Hobby Lobby chain of arts and crafts stores.

The Green family has been acquiring ancient artifacts for many years and recently was caught smuggling items from Iraq into the United States.

The Hobby Lobby company has agreed to pay a $3 million federal fine and forfeit thousands of ancient Iraqi artifacts smuggled from the Middle East that the government alleges were intentionally mislabeled, federal prosecutors said.

They were shipping the artifacts from Israel and the United Arab Emirates to Oklahoma, the US Customs intercepted some of the packages and began the investigation.

The company's deal with the US Government is about ancient clay tablets and not coins.

However, the museum does have an ancient coin exhibit, according to people who were given private tours of the museum.

In another slight numismatic connection, attorney Barry Berke of the Kramer Levin law firm, the primary attorney for the Hobby Lobby in the antiquities case, was the attorney for the Switt-Langbord family in the infamous 1933 Double Eagle lawsuit over possession of ten US $20 gold coins allegedly stolen from the Philadelphia Mint.

The company is also reported to be buying items for it's museum from Ebay.

One can find out more about this case by entering "Hobby Lobby antiquities" into an internet search engine.

 

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Better to end up in a museum than destroyed by terrorists, in my opinion.

 

I'd love to share my thoughts about Hobby Lobby's latest run-in with the law, but I have several things to post about here this weekend, and a vacation would be inconvenient.