U.S. Officials: The Museum of the Bible Must Return a Stolen “Gilgamesh Tablet”

Does the Museum of the Bible have anything worthwhile inside? Because based on news reports, it only seems to be a warehouse for imitations and outright fraud — hardly a way to steer people toward the Gospel.

The evangelical Green family, which founded the museum and owns Hobby Lobby, once owned over 5,500 artifacts that were smuggled via a black market that may fund ISIS — which they returned while paying a $3 million fine. They returned a “lunar” Bible supposedly taken to the moon in 1971 after finding out it was never taken to the moon. They admitted earlier this year that all 16 of their fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls were forgeries. And just last month, we learned biblical fragments made of ancient papyrus, on display inside the building, were in fact stolen from Oxford University.

We can now add another item to the list of stolen goods: The “Gilgamesh Dream Tablet,” bought by the Greens at auction for $1.6 million, which is actually owned by the nation of Iraq according to a complaint from the U.S. Justice Department:

The Gilgamesh epic is a Sumerian poem believed to have been written at least 4,000 years ago. Sections of it mirror details of the Great Flood and the Garden of Eden stories from the Old Testament, which it predates. A 12-tablet version of the poem, written in the Akkadian language, was discovered in the ruins of the library in a palace of Nineveh in present-day Mosul, Iraq.

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Agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations seized the tablet last year from the Museum of the Bible, which, it said, cooperated with the investigation…

So much for “Thou shalt not steal.”

But then, the Greens run a company worth billions of dollars that let hundreds of hourly employees go during a pandemic without any severance package, telling them to apply for unemployment instead. The company isn’t known for its ethics.

At the rate it’s going, the Museum of the Bible will soon become headquarters for atheists worldwide given how much damage it’s doing to the Christian holy book. For the Green family, no lie is too big, no price is too high, and no artifact is too illegitimately acquired if it allows them to promote Christianity.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)