We chalked another little trip off our bucket list this week. When the Museum of the Bible opened in Washington DC in November 2017, Leroy said he wants to go there sometime. Some tour groups have gone but the dates never fit our schedule. So we decided to make our own tour. He scheduled a week of vacation this week and we invited my sisters to join us. They snapped up the offer, so I made all the reservations needed to visit the Museum of the Bible on Wednesday and the Holocaust Museum on Thursday. That included reservations for a parking garage and motel.
We left the house shortly after 7 a.m. Wednesday and met my sisters (and brother-in-law) at Harrisburg where they left their cars and jumped into ours. We found our first parking garage with no trouble and walked to the Museum of the Bible. It was around 11 a.m. so we found a park bench to eat the lunches we had packed. What self-respecting Mennonite would dare to buy food in a big city when you can just as easily take a lunch from home?
We were in the Museum of the Bible until it closed at 5 p.m. and still hadn't seen everything. There are six floors with lots of videos to watch and displays to see that trace the history of writing from clay tablets to electronic tablets.
Some things are facsimiles, such as the Rosetta stone. The black stone is inscribed with decrees issued in Egypt about 196 B. C. The top and middle sections are written in Egyptian hieroglyphic and Demotic scripts while the lower section is written in ancient Greek. This writing was the key to understanding ancient Egyptian literature and civilization.
Many other artifacts are on display. One that attracted my attention was a display of Canaanite gods including Baal and Ashtoreth on the top shelf of this display. I'm sure there were much larger images when they were worshiped but I could not imagine believing something man-made like this had any power. How sad that the Israelites whose God had done great things for them became assimilated into the Canaanite culture and stooped to worshiping these idols! But then, is it any different with Christians today who are taking their cues from the world instead of the Word of God?
Another display that impressed me was the thirty shekels below. These silver coins are probably what Judas received when he betrayed Jesus. The life of a perfect man for a handful of silver! The larger objects are weights used in measuring commodities being sold.
Of course, the main attraction in the museum are the ancient scrolls, codex books and Bibles. This is one of the old copies of the Torah.
At one place a Jewish scribe was engaged in producing a new copy of the Torah. It is done very slowly and meticulously to produce an exact copy. If just one mistake is made he will have to throw away the sheet and start over.
There are many old and rare Bibles on display. I will show you just a few that had special meaning to me. This is the books of the Old Testament prophets translated into German in 1526 by two Anabaptists, Hans Denck and Ludwig Hatzer. It was printed in Worms, Germany, by Peter Schoeffer in 1527. Denck died from the plague in 1527 and Hatzer was martyred in 1529.
This is known as a Froschauer Bible because it was printed by Christopher Froschauer in 1556. It was translated into German by Ulrich Zwingli and based on Luther's translation until 1525 when Swiss vocalizations were added. The translation was the favorite of the Anabaptists and Mennonites brought these Bibles with them when they immigrated to America. They continued to be used as long as they were available and ordained men were expected to have a Froschauer Bible.
Another interesting Bible is a Latin Vulgate which contains Martin Luther's signature. It was printed in Lyon, France, in 1542. The Vulgate was the principal Latin version of the Bible, prepared mainly by St. Jerome in the late 4th century, and (as revised in 1592) adopted as the official text for the Roman Catholic Church. Luther's signature is in the middle of the page below the date of 1545.
This is the first edition of the beloved King James Bible printed in 1611. It was not the first complete English translation but is the one which has endured through the centuries. This is called the "he" Bible because of the pronoun error in Ruth 3:15 "and he went into the citie." The second edition corrected the pronoun and is called the "she" Bible.
When we were chased out at closing time, we made our way back through the rain to the parking garage and got our car. We had supper at a Denny's restaurant and a motel at Camp Springs, Maryland.
We had breakfast Thursday morning at the motel and struck out about 8:30 for the second day of our tour. The Holocaust Museum is not far from the National Mall. Carol has a National Parks passport book. She wanted to go to the Washington Monument to get her book stamped so we did that first. We dropped her off at the Monument and then circled around and picked her up again. She was able to collect a number of stamps there.
After that, we found our second parking garage a half mile from the Holocaust Museum. Because parking is limited in that area, it is advisable to reserve a parking space in advance. The reservations and GPS were two life-savers on this trip. At one point we had an "old-fashioned" GPS device and three phones set to give us directions. We circled around sometimes but the devices always got us back on track. I can't imagine how high the stress level would have been without them. Country bumpkins should not venture into the big city without assistance!
Our tickets for the Holocaust Museum were for 11:15 so once again we found a park bench and had a bit of lunch across the street from the museum. We soon attracted a flock of hopeful sparrows. We shared some tidbits with them. They scorned bits of fruit but loved potato chips and cheese.
We were in this museum five hours and still didn't see everything. I didn't take many pictures because it was just too terrible. One of the few was this collection of shoes that were removed from the feet of the people who were sent to the gas chamber. Both sides of the aisle were filled with shoes of all sizes that were found at a prison camp in Poland when it was liberated.
This message is inscribed on the wall of the museum.
Traffic was terrible as we left the parking garage and started for home. It did not thin out until we were above Baltimore and on I-83. Then we finally stopped to fill the car with gas and our stomachs at Panera Bread. We sailed north then and got home about 9:30 p.m. It was a good trip, made more fun by sharing it with my sisters. And the memories will last longer than the two-day trip. If you have the opportunity, go see both museums. Unless you're a city slicker, be sure you have some form of a GPS with you!
