(FoxNews) As the world’s foremost collector of rare biblical artifacts, Steven Green may have made a deal with the devil – helping to preserve Iraq’s disappearing Christian heritage by allegedly buying black market items plundered by the Islamic State.
Green, whose family-owned Hobby Lobby company clashed bitterly with the Obama administration over federal health care laws that required it to cover reproductive services, is being investigated by Customs & Border Protection reportedly for attempting to smuggle as many as 300 age-old cuneiform tablets from Iraq into the U.S. via Israel, labeling them “tiles.” It was not clear if the probe centers on Green, the company, or both, but the shipment was reportedly addressed to Hobby Lobby headquarters in Oklahoma City.
The tablets, which The Daily Beast reported are thousands of years old and inscribed with text used in ancient Assyria and Babylonia, were seized by Customs agents in Memphis, Tenn., in 2011, but were on their way into Green’s collection of the “rarest and most significant biblical texts and artifacts ever assembled” including “cuneiform tablets dating from the time of Abraham, Dead Sea Scroll fragments, biblical papyri and manuscripts, Torah scrolls, and rare printed Bibles.”
