Room for the People Pushed Out
"On reaching Jerusalem, Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves, and would not allow anyone to carry merchandise through the temple courts. And as he taught them, he said, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”"
— Mark 11:15-17
Only the outermost court of that huge walled platform was open to non-Jews. A stone barrier closed off everything past it, and Josephus reported that its notices stood in Greek and in Latin: a foreigner who went further was killed for it. One of those stones was later found whole and another in pieces, and the lettering can still be read. That outer ground was as far as a foreigner could come and pray. Mark does not say where in the complex the trading stood, though that same ground is the likely spot. Pilgrims arrived from all over the empire carrying whatever silver their own cities minted, so exchanging it was ordinary work. A pair of pigeons was what the law allowed when a lamb was out of reach, and in other cases what it required of everyone, whatever they earned. The line about the nations comes from Isaiah, who had promised foreigners a welcome in that very place. The word behind the charge meant armed bandits who robbed travellers on the road, not petty thieves. He had walked through the whole place the evening before and left without touching it, and by the evening of this day the chief priests were looking for a way to kill him. He cleared the floor for the people everyone else had pushed to the edge.