Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal


The Hobby Lobby smuggling scandal started in 2009 when representatives of Hobby Lobby received a large number of clay bulla and tablets. The artifacts were intended for the Museum of the Bible, funded by the Evangelical Christian Green family, which owns the Oklahoma-based chain of craft stores. Internal staff had warned superiors that the items had dubious provenance and were potentially stolen. In 2017 the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York directed Hobby Lobby to return the artifacts and pay a fine of. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement returned 3,800 items seized from Hobby Lobby to Iraq in May 2018. In March 2020 the Hobby Lobby president agreed to return 11,500 items to Egypt and Iraq.

Illegal importation of cultural property

Through the 2000s, the entire antiquities marketespecially Hobby Lobby staffhad been widely and publicly warned of the proliferation of fakes, all manufactured with the same cheap flaws that are obvious to expert analysts. Further, the scholar community disparaged the Museum's entire mission, including this statement from Jodi Magness, president of the Archaeological Institute of America: " archaeology is being used as a means of proving the historicity and accuracy of the biblical text, that is extremely problematic". She generally warned, "Many antiquities surely come from illegal excavations or looting of archaeological sites". As the Justice Department would later reveal, "In October 2010, an expert on cultural property law retained by Hobby Lobby warned the company that the acquisition of cultural property likely from Iraq, including cuneiform tablets and cylinder seals, carries a risk that such objects may have been looted from archaeological sites in Iraq. The expert also advised Hobby Lobby to review its collection of antiquities for any objects of Iraqi origin and to verify that their country of origin was properly declared at the time of importation into the United States. The expert warned Hobby Lobby that an improper declaration of country of origin for cultural property could lead to seizure and forfeiture of the artifacts by CBP."
Reportedly, "dealers across the world were clamoring to sell to the Greens" while the family retained world-class master advisors in antiquities.
In December 2010, Hobby Lobby purchased $1.6 million worth of Iraqi artifacts from dealers in the United Arab Emirates. The company continued the purchase despite concerns from lawyers over the uncertain origin of the artifacts, and the possibility that they could have been looted. The shipments included tablets inscribed with cuneiform writing, which were misrepresented on declarations as being ceramic and clay tile samples, and contained false designations of origin stating that the objects were from Turkey and Israel. Steve Green told CNN that they'd discovered fragments of the Book of Romans in just the previous 48 hours, which would later be audited to have been actually purchased 18 months prior. The company became subject to investigation by the U.S. government for these actions.
Many of the artifacts collected by the Green family, the evangelical owners of the craft-supply chain Hobby Lobby, lacked any supporting evidence of their history or ownership. This raised the possibility that the artifacts had been possibly looted or sold on the black market. Archaeologists say some items may have come from the National Museum of Iraq which had been looted after America's mass-destructive invasion of Iraq in 2003. Hobby Lobby made mass purchases with few pieces of vague paperwork and scant descriptions, and "having commissioned inexperienced scholars to analyze ancient texts" according to Bible scholars in the book Bible Nation. The Museum's chief curator in 2017 summarized "We can't even tell sometimes which particular item belonged to which acquisition, because it just wasn't documented either at the acquisition point or at the delivery point.... So we have no way of knowing where these came from."
In early July 2017, US federal prosecutors filed a civil complaint in the Eastern District of New York under the case name United States of America v. Approximately Four Hundred Fifty Ancient Cuneiform Tablets and Approximately Three Thousand Ancient Clay Bullae.
On July 5, 2017, Hobby Lobby consented to a settlement requiring forfeiture of the artifacts and payment of a fine of $3 million and the return of more than 5500 artifacts.
In the early hours of July 30, 2017, Israeli authorities raided several private residences and storefronts in Jerusalem belonging to five antiquities dealers of Palestinian origin and confiscated several historical artifacts, including a papyrus fragment from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and a Pompeiian fresco, and more than in cash. They also found evidence of money laundering and tax evasion, as well as receipts bearing Christian Green's names. The Israeli Antiquities Authority had been contacted in 2016 by the United States Department of Homeland Security, and provided Israeli authorities with evidence of money transfers between Green and Israeli-licensed antiquities dealers. In all, five individuals were arrested for tax evasion. Biblical scholars in the book Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby report that the Green family's philanthropic activitiesincluding antiquities donations to its own museumhave always followed a set ratio of 3:1, of the appraised value to the purchase price. This is reportedly with the goal of a large profit margin by way of tax write-off, wherein "the government is effectively paying the Greens to amass a collection of dubious antiquities".
The 2019 book Tablets From the Irisaĝrig Archive mentions the scandal in its analysis of more than one thousand cuneiform tablets, possibly stolen from Irisaĝrig, a 4,000-year-old lost city in Iraq. The tablets, purchased by Hobby Lobby, were studied over a four year period while in the company's Oklahoma storerooms. "The new find shows that the company Hobby Lobby — whose co-owner, Steve Green, helped found the Museum of the Bible in November 2017 in Washington, D.C. — had far more cuneiform tablets obtained from this city, and other sites in Iraq, than previously believed." Up to 1400 artifacts to be returned to Iraq appear to be missing from the Hobby Lobby collection.

Collections management controversy

Counterfeit items

In October 2018, the Museum of the Bible revealed that five of its sixteen Dead Sea Scrolls fragments are counterfeit; and in March 2020, independent art fraud investigators hired by the museum revealed that all sixteen fragments are counterfeit, made from ancient leather and modern inks.
The museum removed the display of another disputed artifact, a miniature bible which a NASA astronaut had purportedly carried to the moon.

Stolen items

In October 2019, officials from the British Egypt Exploration Society, a nonprofit organization that manages the Papyri Project, alleged that Oxford academic Dirk Obbink engaged in the theft and sale of "at least 11 ancient Bible fragments to the Green family, the Hobby Lobby owners who operate a Bible museum and charitable organization in Washington". The museum said it will return the fragments to the Egypt Exploration Society and Oxford University.
In March 2020, National Geographic reported that the museum was "reevaluating the provenance of all the material in its collection" with the intent of returning stolen objects. Steve Green, the museum's board chairman and the president of Hobby Lobby, announced the museum will be returning 11,500 artifacts to Egypt and Iraq, including thousands of papyrus scraps and ancient clay pieces. Green admitted, "I knew little about the world of collecting... The criticism of the museum resulting from my mistakes was justified." Manchester University papyrologist Roberta Mazza stated that the Green family "poured millions on the legal and illegal antiquities market without having a clue about the history, the material features, cultural value, fragilities, and problems of the objects".
This return includes the Gilgamesh Dream Tablet, containing part of the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in Iraq in 1853, sold by the Jordanian Antiquities Association to an antiquities dealer in 2003, and sold again by Christie's auction house to Hobby Lobby in 2014 for $1.6 million. The auction house lied about how the artifact had entered the market, claiming it had been on the market in the United States for decades. In September 2019, federal authorities seized the tablet, and in May 2020, a civil complaint was filed to forfeit it.