12 And Jesus entered the temple of God and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. 13 He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer’; but you make it a den of robbers.” Matt. 21:12-13 (c.f. Mark 11:15; John 2:14-15)
FYI: Messiah had started His ministry by cleansing out these tables [John 2:12-18], and He now does the same at the end of His ministry. This was a direct assault on the priest’s authority and exposed their greed to the people.
Temple Administration
The Temple, and all that happened in it, was administered by the Sadducees. They were the Priests who ran the temple. They had Scriptural authority to decide the order of the proceedings. This temple leadership controlled the worship: they controlled the sacrifices, the washings, and the prayers. They were responsible for keeping the Temple as a place “set apart unto the Lord.” The Torah makes it plain that the Temple Priests were to get their income from the hides of all the animal sacrifices, with a few notable exceptions [Lev 7:8]. History records that the Priests did run huge tanneries just outside the city walls. This was their allotment according to Scripture. Nothing more.
As Messiah had started His ministry by cleansing out these tables [John 2:12-18] He now does the same at the end of His ministry. This was a direct assault on their authority, as well as a full-on attack on their greed.
The Torah contains no instructions for the exchange of money for sacrificial animals. So they made a rule. All transactions for the Temple had to be in their Temple currency of silver shekels. This scheme to profit from the exchange rates that the priests themselves set was an outrage. People were coming into the Temple from all over the Roman Empire; they were forced to exchange the many and various local currencies they had for the Temple’s silver shekels. The priests set the terms and the rates. The whole system had corrupted. There is no admonition to do this in the Old Testament.
Coins did not come into use till Alexander the Great. Before the Greek Empire started producing coins, silver and gold were measured at every exchange of goods. The shekel was originally just a measurement of silver. So, having made the rule that everything must be traded in their own private currency, the Priests set up tables and allowed animals in the court of the Gentiles for this purpose. The purchasing of sacrificial animals needed to be done somehow, although you could make the case that the Priests could have allowed foreign coins without exchanging them for shekels. And of course, all the buying and selling could and should have been done outside the temple.
This system was corrupt. The exchange rates were overinflated. The value of the shekel made it difficult for the poor to pay. The Messiah specifically mentions the sacrifice of the poor, the lowly, and the inexpensive pigeons. The poor were being denied their rightful obligations to the Lord.
Messiah Quoted Jeremiah
Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, says the LORD. Jer. 7:11
The sacrifices are what made the Temple a place of prayer. The sacrifices, the temporary removal of sin, or the joyful adoration of thanksgiving, were the means of communication between man and God. The dishonest dealings were robbing the people of their ability to pray.
The last three days of Messiah’s life were spent admonishing those who ran the Temple for their corruption. The Priests were not operating the Temple as a house of prayer unto the Lord, but instead it had become the very habitation of thieves.
