Hobby Lobby, big-box purveyor of cut-rate craft supplies and idiosyncratic selections of register candy, last made national headlines for challenging the federal government on the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate. But Hobby Lobby’s owners, the Oklahoma-based Green family, have now set their sights on greater things. No longer content to traffic purely in yarn, felt, or health care policy, the Greens have begun trafficking in potentially looted antiquities plucked from conflict zones in the Middle East.

This week Candida Moss and Joel Baden—professors at Notre Dame and Yale Divinity School, respectively—reported that federal investigators are looking into a shipment of more than 200 ancient clay tablets procured by the Greens from Iraq via Israel. The feds intercepted the tablets in Memphis in 2011, en route to Hobby Lobby’s Oklahoma headquarters. Thousands of years old, the tablets are inscribed with cuneiform, an ancient script consisting of wedge-shaped characters thought to be among the earliest forms of writing. The tablets were evidently destined for the Greens’ forthcoming Museum of the Bible, projected to open in Washington, D.C., in 2017.

Both federal and international laws prohibit the plunder of antiquities from conflict zones, as well as the ruins of important historical sites. At the end of last September, the International Criminal Court began trial proceedings against militants accused of destroying cultural heritage sites in Mali in 2012, pursuant to several strictures placed on the destruction and/or looting of historical sites by past Hague conventions. Federally, the Greens could be guilty of customs fraud, misrepresenting the value and origin of the illicitly imported tablets.

Yet I confess that when I initially read about the federal government’s intervention, I was relieved. Even if the Greens wind up permanently surrendering them to government officials, I reasoned, it would be better than leaving such priceless artifacts in Iraq, where countless historical objects have already been destroyed by ISIS’s ruthless campaign against reminders of the region’s supposedly idolatrous past. Since taking over large swaths of Iraq and Syria, ISIS has destroyed mosques, churches, tombs, shrines, ancient monuments, and other historical sites. The group's campaign of destruction also extends to human life. Last August, militants in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra executed Khaled al-Assad, a scholar of antiquities, for refusing to reveal where some of the city’s artifacts had been hidden for safekeeping.

So any ancient artifacts in Iraq and Syria are currently compromised. For those of us who do not want to see Middle Eastern Christianity erased from the region and its history (and other embattled religious minorities and their respective histories), the preservation of cultural objects and sites is therefore extremely important.