Den of Brigands

Jesus’ condemnation of the temple as a “den of brigands” is drawn from Jeremiah’s temple speech.  Because of the idolatries, injustices, and bloodthirstiness of the temple authorities, the temple is going to be destroyed.

But the text might also hold a fainter allusion to Zechariah 11.  Matthew conflates Zechariah and Jeremiah in chapter 27, and his explicit quotations from Zechariah (your king is coming; strike the Shepherd; thirty pieces of silver) are interspersed throughout the Passion narrative not only with references to Psalms (22; 69) but also to Lamentations and Jeremiah (on Lamentation allusions, see David Moffitt’s 2006 article in JBL ).

In his narrative of the shepherd in chapter 11, Zechariah condemns the shepherds of Israel who enrich themselves by selling off the flock.  Jesus’ interruption of the buying and selling in the temple is, as NT Wright says, an interruption of the sacrificial procedures.  It is also, in the light of Zechariah 11, a symbolic condemnation of the practice of the priests, who enrich themselves on the people, whose perverse priestly work involves slaughtering not flock-animals but the flock of Israel.

Zechariah says that the priests have no more pity for the people than they do for a sacrificial animal (cf. Marvin Sweeney’s Berit Olam commentary on Zechariah).  ”No pity” is the demand of herem warfare; making holy war against substitutionary animals is what priests do.  They are not to carry out a war of utter destruction against the people.  They are not to treat Israel as Canaanites.  In response, Yahweh threatens an eye-for-eye punishment.  The shepherds have no pity, Yahweh will have no pity.   Herem for herem .

Zechariah 11 fits the temple scene in Matthew very neatly.  The priests of Jesus’ day are as corrupt as the priests of Jeremiah’s and Zechariah’s day.  They make war on the people without pity, “selling” them into slavery (including the slave yoke of oral traditioned Torah) and enriching themselves as a result (much as Eli and his sons made themselves fat by abusing the flock/flock).  Jesus’ enacts Yahweh’s coming herem against Jerusalem and Herod’s temple.