Israel Museum
Israel Museum
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Israel Museum, the national museum of Israel, is in Jerusalem near the Israeli Knesset, Supreme Court and Bible Lands Museum. Opened in 1965 and repeatedly expanded, Israel Museum covers 20 acres and annually receives almost a million visitors. Above is its outdoor model of first century Jerusalem with the Temple of Jerusalem in the foreground.
What is peculiar about Israel Museum?
While most countries' national museums portray their own history in a positive light, Israel Museum denigrates Israel's own origin, history, religion, and portrays paganism and Islam in a positive light. Below are seven of the examples; the photos show panels on display in the Israel Museum's permanent exhibit.
1. In the 22nd century BC, God chose Abram, later renamed Abraham, his son Isaac, Isaac's son Jacob, whom God renamed, "Israel," and his descendants - "Israelites" - as His people. Israel Museum claims the Israelites originated a thousand years after the patriarchs named above, that they ceased to be a people at the start of the Babylonian exile, and falsely attributes these erroneous claim to the Bible:
2. Israel Museum dismisses Israel's exile in and exodus from Egypt and claims that Israel's sin of worshipping idols at "high places," which the Bible says "angered the Lord" (see further below), were actually "biblical":
And in every single city of Judah he made high places to burn incense to other gods, and provoked to anger the Lord God of his fathers (2 Chronicles 28:25). Now Josiah also took away all the shrines of the high places that were in the cities of Samaria, which the kings of Israel had made to provoke the Lord to anger; and he did to them according to all the deeds he had done in Bethel. (2 Kings 23:19)
3. In the Bible, which God wrote using people as His writing instruments, God strictly forbade the Israelites from marrying their pagan "neighbors" (see bottom) in Canaan,* lest they be led astray to engage in pagan idolatry that included burning children as human sacrifices to pagan idols.** Israel Museum accuses God of having had a "desire to paint these neighbors in a primarily negative light," and speaks of marriage with these pagan "neighbors," who did lead Israel into pagan idolatry, as a positive development:
4. Israel began worshipping the one true God when He first called Abram: Now the Lord had said to Abram: "Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing" (Genesis 12:1-2). Israel Museum denies this and also calls paganism, which God called an "abomination",** a "rich folk religion" instead:
5. Israel Museum claims idolatrous pagan objects provided hope and security:
6. Israel Museum mischaracterizes Jesus' message of faith in Him and repentance from sin. Compare the museum's claims below with Why Jesus Was Crucified and Garden of Gethsemane.
7. Israel Museum praises the Muslim builder of the Dome of the Rock, which occupies the location of the Jewish Temple of Jerusalem, and perpetuates the fallacy that Jerusalem is an Islamic "holy city":
* "When the Lord your God brings you into the land which you go to possess, and has cast out many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than you, and when the Lord your God delivers them over to you, you shall conquer them and utterly destroy them. You shall make no covenant with them nor show mercy to them. Nor shall you make marriages with them. You shall not give your daughter to their son, nor take their daughter for your son. For they will turn your sons away from following Me, to serve other gods; so the anger of the Lord will be aroused against you and destroy you suddenly. But thus you shall deal with them: you shall destroy their altars, and break down their sacred pillars, and cut down their wooden images, and burn their carved images with fire." (Deuteronomy 7:1-5)
** And they built the high places of Baal which are in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire to Molech, which I did not command them, nor did it come into My mind that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin. (Jeremiah 32:35)