Looking harder than the Forward’s critic, Dalia Hatuqa, who describes herself as “a journalist based in Washington, DC and the West Bank,” did find Judeo-Arabic texts written in Arabic script, and more Arabic in the special exhibitions on loan from Israel. This, in a piece helpfully titled by his editors “We Went to the Museum of the Bible-So You Don’t Have To.”
The bible discovery museum free#
“It seems egregious,” he fulminated at one point, “that while American Christians rightfully decry the oppression of Christians in the Muslim world, the Museum of the Bible is-unless I missed it- completely free of Arabic” (emphasis added). The family became notorious in some circles (and heroic in others) for winning a Supreme Court ruling to the effect that closely-held private businesses cannot be required by law to follow regulations-in this case, the requirement to include presumed abortifacients in employees’ health insurance-to which they have religious objections.Īn outright aversion to the Greens’ Christian faith clearly animated the would-be novelist who wrote a scattershot review in the Forward grasping at any straw that could be connected, however remotely, to their Christianity and weaponized against it. So why the brickbats? From the silly but vehement, to the serious, to the book-length, let’s sample them.įirst: the museum’s founders, David and Barbara Green, are evangelical Christians who earned a fortune running the Hobby Lobby craft stores that they manage together with their adult children.
it gives a straightforward account of American history, from the first colonists to the civil-rights era and beyond, through the prism of the Bible, but in a way that many visitors will probably find more compelling and accessible than the dense cultural stew on view at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History. It doesn’t foreground trendy ideas about multiculturalism, and it isn’t “thematic,” or focused on broad ideas at the expense of chronological clarity. The new attraction is an up-to-date version of an old-fashioned museum, telling linear stories in a complex and detailed way. In a calm, candid, and accurate review of the museum in the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott wrote: Not to mention the Washington Revelations Flyboard Ride that takes you on a virtual tour of America’s capital-a city where biblical references turn out to be embedded in unexpected places. The exhibition space includes two narrative floors where artifacts and technology work together to present, respectively, the History of the Bible and the Impact of the Bible major galleries devoted to special exhibits special-effects galleries where the story of the Bible is told through immersive experiences and a charming first-floor children’s museum where kids can face off against Goliath or sort loaves and fishes into baskets. The Museum of the Bible is indeed massive, even if you exclude its two large restaurants, a rooftop Biblical Garden, a ballroom that seats hundreds, and a theater now hosting a musical about William Wilberforce, the English politician and deeply religious father of the anti-slavery movement. Evidently, it is for some or all of these reasons that so many of the nation’s critics are outraged. The museum houses an enormous display of the history and archaeology of the Bible. The loud noise that you can hear from the National Mall in Washington is the sound of brickbats pelting the glass roof of the city’s new Museum of the Bible (MOTB).
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