Hobby Lobby, which recently forfeited the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the world’s oldest works of literature it purchased for $1.6-million, has now been ordered to give up hundreds of religious artifacts including a Bible stolen by CEO David Green from a room in a suburban Oklahoma City motel.
Green, billionaire founder of the Christian arts and crafts retailer, said he stayed at the Motel 6 near the company’s headquarters because “I had some unfinished business with a staff member and the office was closed for the night.”
“When I opened the Bible, it appeared to me to be a first-edition Gideon and I took it to have it authenticated,” Green said. “I mean, the Jerubbesheth signature looked real.”
The Justice Department also has ordered Green to relinquish what Melissa Godbold, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Oklahoma City field office, said was “an autographed ‘To Dave, from Me’ plastic dashboard Jesus, probably a fake.”
Hobby Lobby also was ordered to turn over:
* an unspecified number of six-foot-tall statues of Mary holding Entrance or Exit signs,
* 50 Halloween Holy Ghost costumes made by Wamsutta,
* 500 Nativity finger puppets,
* a dozen patens with Rye or White inscriptions,
* a Torah mistakenly labeled New and Improved Testament,
* a chalice from the palace,
* a vessel with a pestle, and
* a flagon with a dragon.
All apparently were taken from the Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Hollywood, Calif.
The rare 3,600-year-old tablet contains portions of the Epic of Gilgamesh, which Hobby Lobby bought at auction from Christie’s for display in its Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. It originated in what is now part of Iraq and the U.S. Government said it must be returned.
Green said he was “not familiar with the story of Gilgamesh until someone from Little Light Christian School in Oklahoma City called me, heard we had it and told me it was about the, ahem, ‘relationship’ between these two guys, Enkidu and Gilgamesh. I told him it was disgusting and was going to get rid of it but the feds beat me to it.”
This is not the first time Hobby Lobby’s Museum of the Bible has been victimized by fake religious items. Last year it confirmed that 16 Dead Sea Scroll fragments were forgeries after a clerk in the mail room figured out they were created around 1985 on a Commodore 64 computer.
And in 2017 Hobby Lobby was fined $3-million after admitting that several thousand artifacts which it was displaying and claimed had come from ancient sites in Iraq, Iran and Syria had in fact been manufactured by Hasbro after the toy company discontinued its line of Cabbage Patch Kids and retooled the factory.
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