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Mat_21:13. Free combination of Isa_56:7 and Jer_7:11, and taken from the Sept.
κληθής .] how sacred the purpose for which it was intended, but ye, etc.
ποιεῖτε (see critical notes) censures this desecration of the temple as a thing in which they are still persisting.
σπήλαιον λῃστῶν ] The strong language of the prophet (otherwise in John) was in keeping with the emotion that was awakened in Jesus. The use of such language is sufficiently accounted for by the fact that avarice had taken up its abode in those sacred precincts to carry on its huckstering and money-changing: τὸ γὰρ φιλοκερδὲς λῃστρικὸν πάθος ἐστι , Theophylact. Differently Fritzsche: “Vos undequaque pecuniam, animalia hue congerere sustinetis, ut latrones praedam comportant in speluncam,”—where, however, due prominence is not given to the distinctive point of comparison, viz. the robbery.
In Mat_21:12-13, Jesus acts with higher authority than that of a mere zealot (Num_25:11): He addresses Himself to the purifying of the temple and its worship with such a reforming energy as, according to Mal_3:1-3, befitted the Messiah. Comp. Bertholdt, Christol. p. 163; Ullmann, Sündl. p. 177. And the acquiescence of the astonished multitude is all the more intelligible on the occasion of this cleansing, that the indignant reformer had just celebrated His triumphal march into the city in the character of Messiah. But even on the first occasion, John 2, their acquiescence is sufficiently explicable from the sudden and decided nature of the proceeding, taken in connection with the spiritually-imposing character of the Lord’s person and bearing (“divinitatis majestas lucebat in facie,” Jerome), so that it is quite needless to resort to the hypothesis of a miracle (Origen, Jerome).