This week my Good Wife and I traveled to Washington to join with friends in touring the Museum of the Bible. A private entity in Southwest Washington near the Mall, the museum began in 2010 with the purchase of a large, industrial brick building dating from the early 20th century in which the contents of railroad cars were refrigerated prior to transit.
The simple design of the brickwork is impressive, the original of which now is crowned with a modern top floor, making for four floors of exhibition space. We spent an afternoon there, but the visit could have encompassed a day for each floor.
The museum exhibits are interactive, taking the visitors through the Bible from the Book of Genesis through parts of both the Old and New Testaments. Some galleries are mini-theaters, explaining the Bible story on screen and others are structures in which the visitors walk through places associated with the biblical Holy Land, occasionally guided by costumed interpreters.
In depicting life in the time of the Bible, not only is the written word explained, but the life in Palestine is brought forth as well. We were able to see the dietary practices of biblical times with tables set with fruits and vegetables that would have been part of daily life. Interspersed along the way are exhibits of items that people would have used for eating and large pottery water containers, some of which are reproductions, but others are survivors from the period.
Of particular interest to me was the explanation of the significance of the olive tree in the economy of the Holy Land in ancient times. Not only did it provide vital food and oil for the family, but its product was a resource in trade and barter as well. Several massive examples of olive trees have been reconstructed, giving visitors the idea of the tree’s importance then, as it remains a vital resource in the Middle East to this day.
The fourth floor exhibits focus on biblical archeology, tracing various manuscripts and printings of the Bible across the centuries, beginning with Saint Jerome of Stridon, also known as Hieronymus, who translated the Bible into Latin in the late fourth and early fifth centuries at the behest of Pope Damasus I.
In 382 Damasus had presided over the Council of Rome which first defined what the authentic books of the Bible were, thereafter the Pope wanted to have a Bible in one uniform language to be the basis for preaching and scholarship. The exhibits continue through the editions produced during the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, with explanatory notations describing how the Reformers defined the differences of interpreting what the authentic books of the Bible are.
Seeing the illuminated scripts dating from medieval times when monks and nuns copied the texts by hand, with all the embellishments characteristic of calligraphy at that time, was one of the major highlights of our visit. During the Middle Ages, sometimes erroneously termed “the Dark Ages,” monasticism was the means of keeping the Sacred Scriptures alive until the inventions of the printing press with the first printed edition of the Bible having been produced by Johannes Gutenberg at Mainz in modern-day Germany in 1453. His reconstructed print shop is worth a visit when in Germany.
The Museum of the Bible, which is non-sectarian, developed from the plans of Steve Green, the son of David Green who founded the chain of Hobby Lobby stores in Oklahoma in 1972, to bring together in one place a means for people to traverse the course of the Bible. The space is used effectively to that end, and the museum is well worth a visit.
