It wasn’t just Jewish worshippers that God cared about; his Temple was supposed to provide a welcoming refuge for everyone from the surrounding nations who sought the true God (cf. 2 Chr 6:32-33).

Days before his crucifixion, Jesus came to a Temple awash with commerce (Matt 21:12–13). Nothing inherently sinful about business—though by most accounts the currency exchange and monopoly on officially kosher animals was rife with exploitation and abuse. Something may be legitimate in its own context which, when mingled with worship, results in a pollution and prostitution that twists the sacred into something sordid. The Temple was supposed to furnish an atmosphere of dignity and sanctity; it had become a circus of clamor and corruption.

This enterprising desecration seems to have been instigated by Caiaphas, who became High Priest when Jesus was in his early 20s. Approved markets already existed outside the city where kosher items could be procured for Temple sacrifice; but Caiaphas apparently “wished to set up a market which would be in punitive competition with the traditional markets on the Mount of Olives” (Lane, Mark, 403). The Bazaars of the Sons of Annas they came to be named (Caiaphas was Annas’s son-in-law), after the high priest whose infamy is detailed not only in the NT but by the ancient historian Josephus as well. This market was located in the large and outermost precincts of the Temple known as the Court of the Gentiles. The volume of animals necessary to service the sacrifices for this massively attended sacred feast was staggering. “The Court of the Gentiles was a virtual stock market of animal dealers and money changers” (Edwards, Mark, 341-42). Even aside from the financial shenanigans, the noise and smell and commotion can only be imagined.

Jesus protested on the grounds of Isaiah 56:7, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’” (Matt 21:13). In the same breath, he pulled a phrase from Jeremiah 7:11 to highlight the contrast between what God intended the Temple to be and what they had made it: “a den of thieves.”

Jesus was not merely condemning the raw commercialization and dodgy dealing going on in this unholy bazaar. He was accusing them—as God had accused their forefathers through Jeremiah seven centuries earlier—of turning the house of God into their lair and base of operations.

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