ed note–No Christian who has spent even 5 minutes reading his/her Gospels should be surprised at this in the least. That Torah Judaism and Gospel Christianity are as opposed to each other as are the wolf and the sheep is as undeniable as Sarah Silverman or Harvey Weinstein. Jesus made it very clear in His various statements that there could be no co-mixing of His message of honesty, peace, compassion, etc with the various protocols making up the violent, rapacious, and duplicitous precepts of Judaism. ‘No man can serve 2 masters’, and ‘I send you out as sheep amidst the wolves’ were not just flowery words meant to pass the time, but indeed, factual statements meant to convey to His (true) followers that Judaism was their mortal, eternal enemy, as well as that of the entire human race.

The Jewish Daily Forward

The new Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., is chock full of Torahs and cutting edge technology, but lacks the evangelical touch that many were expecting, the Washington Post reported.

The $500 million museum, which opens next month, is funded primarily by the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, a conservative Christian group that routinely advocates for conservative Christian causes.

The museum purportedly contains the world’s largest private collection of Torahs, but does not encourage visitors to take the bible literally — or take Jesus into their hearts. It is a far cry from the Green family’s stated goal when it began to lay the groundwork for the museum ten years ago: to “bring to life the living word of God . . . to inspire confidence in the absolute authority” of the bible.

“The museum has fence posts — limits. It doesn’t overtly say the Bible is good — that the Bible is true,” Steve Green, the Hobby Lobby chief executive and chair of the museum, told the Washington Post. “That’s not its role. Its role is to present facts and let people make their own decisions.”

The not-for-profit museum is 430,000 square feet of high-tech exhibits showing ancient Jerusalem and digital displays of biblical verses, with a research center that is expected to produce a bible education curriculum for schools.

Judaism Is The Star At A Bible Museum Built By Evangelicals

The Jewish Daily Forward

As the Burning Bush crackles, God’s name is heard.

“Mow-zes,” God says in the mysterious mid-Atlantic accent that Hollywood once trained its actors to use — the one Anne Baxter as Nefertiti used to summon Charlton Heston’s Moses in the 1956 blockbuster “The Ten Commandments.” “Mow-zes, Mow-zes.”

That epic, earnest and seemingly endless film has much in common with the Museum of the Bible, the $500 million extravaganza gifted to the National Mall by one of America’s leading evangelical families, the founders of the Hobby Lobby chain.

The museum celebrates Jews and Judaism as the noble, beloved and even feared antecedents to Christianity, and argues that its best modern expression is in the State of Israel. And it makes the case that the Bible is not merely to be studied but to be believed.

Speaking at the dedication Friday, Steven Green, the president of Hobby Lobby and the museum’s chairman of the board, said museumgoers should come away realizing that the Bible “has had a positive impact on their lives in so many different ways and when they leave they will be inspired to open it.”

It especially celebrates the Bible’s Jewish origins, notably those made manifest in modern Israel. The dedication included a rabbi, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, the Israeli minister of tourism and the director of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

At times, the event seemed like a pro-Israel gala. Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador, celebrated the museum as a signifier of the Jewish claim to Jerusalem. The Bible nurtured Jews through 2,000 years of exile until they were able to “rebuild the original DC — David’s Capital,” he said.

Yariv Levin, the tourism minister, read a letter from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who sent “warm greetings from Jerusalem, the eternal and undivided capital of Israel.”

The deference to Judaism is evident in the museum logo, a B flat on its face resembling the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and the museum store, where Star of David pendants glitter next to crucifixes. If you have $80 to spare, you can choose a crucifix or Hanukkah menorah made from Jerusalem stone facing each other on the same shelf.

The museum also makes the Bible as unmistakably American as someone named, well, Charlton Heston. One permanent exhibit is dedicated to the biblical underpinnings of the abolition of slavery and of the civil rights movement.

The U.S.-born Dermer picked up on the theme of his native land as a nation whose origins were in the Bible.

“Those ideas inscribed in your founding documents and etched on your statues are not merely the values of America, they are the values of the Bible,” he said in his address.

Scholarship at the museum is pervasive, but employed a la Cecil B. DeMille: to prove the Bible is not just compelling but true.

A day at the museum — officials say a thorough tour would take 72 hours — may leave you smarter about the Bible’s origins, the stated agenda of the museum. But you may also suspect that the goal of this newfound knowledge is not to encourage critique but belief. The approach is closer to seminary than religious studies department.

Executive Director Tony Zeiss was unambiguous about the museum’s desired effect at the dedication ceremony.

“This is a day to rejoice, it is the Lord’s day!” he said.

Designers of the museum, he added, had two overarching criteria: “Will this lift up the Bible, and will it lift up people?”

The museum employs scholarship to make that case.

“We engaged leading scholars around the country,” Green, the scion of the family that runs the Hobby Lobby chain, said Wednesday in a news briefing.

But scholarship alone wouldn’t sell it, so like most contemporary museums, there are plenty of experiential exhibits.

“If you put a Bible under a glass case in a language I can’t read, it will only hold my attention for so long,” Green explained.

Judaism as parent suffuses just about every exhibit, including one that media and special guests walked through earlier this week: The Hebrew Bible. It’s an immersive 30-minute stroll through animations and special effects illustrated by supple, handsome animated Hebrews. (The Burning Bush, a riot of bright yellow light in a darkened room, was genuinely thrilling.) That’s more than twice as long as the 12 1/2-minute immersive New Testament experience.

On the fifth floor of this six-floor mammoth comprising much of a Washington block are artifacts contributed by Israel’s Antiquities Authority. The exhibit is permanent, but the Israeli authority will rotate the items about 1,500 at a time.

The debt to Judaism is seen in the kosher-style food at Manna, the rooftop restaurant run by a couple who wrote “The New Jewish Table” cookbook. (Two kosher items per meal will be available at the restaurant.)

Judaism and its origins in Israel are evident as well in a temporary exhibit, through May, organized by Jerusalem’s Bible Lands Museum, which served as a consultant to the D.C. museum.

It is there that one gets to the crux of what makes this museum different from all others. An exhibit of finds from Khirbet Queiafa, a village dating to the time when King David is purported to have ruled, begins with a replica of the Tel Dan Stele. The stone table validates, to a degree, the historical accuracy of the battle of Jezreel, where Yoram, king of Israel and Ahaziah, king of Judah were killed, as recounted in 2 Kings 9.

The stele is important because it contains the oldest reference to King David, who lived two centuries or so earlier. It establishes that David was likely a real person.

But it also diverges from the Bible, crediting Hazael, an Aramaic king, and not Jehu, the Israeli king, with the victory.

The real stele is at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where a docent will explain how the radically different accounts at once validate the ancient Jewish presence in the land — but undercut the notion that the Bible is less revealed truth than it is a political document written by the ultimate victors.

In this exhibit, the accompanying text refers only to a “different version” appearing in the Bible. MiYoung Im, the museum’s antiquities curator who trained first as a theologian in Korea and then in Israel as an archaeologist, said she appreciated the stele both as a Christian and as someone trained to view artifacts as a scholarly outsider.

Nonetheless, she said, the significance of the stele for the new museum was not in how it differed from the Bible, but how it validated it.

“We want to show how this exhibit relates to the time of David,” she said. “We can’t prove where David lived — we can show that he lived.”