How to read this page

An Intertextuality Pair — one connection between two passages, shown as linked verse cards: the Later text and the Earlier text it quotes, alludes to or echoes. The Significance essay explains why the link matters and where it points in Christ.

Reference Type— how explicit the link is: Quotation, Allusion, or Echo
Connection Method(s)— how it carries meaning: e.g. Typology, Promise-Fulfillment, Analogy, Longitudinal Theme
Found via— where the connection was identified, e.g. the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge or an Anchor-Text Network

Graph View — tap the constellation icon in the top bar to see this page's connections as a web of light: gold points are passages, and the coloured threads are the connection types. Click any type in the graph's own legend to filter it in or out, and use the expand control for the full-screen night sky.

New to a term? The Glossary explains every abbreviation and term on the site in plain words.

Intertextuality Pair

Luke 19:45-46 → Ezra 9:1

Allusion

Later text

Luke 19:45-46BSB

Then Jesus entered the temple courts and began to drive out those who were selling there. He declared to them, “It is written: ‘My house will be a house of prayer.’ But you have made it ‘a den of robbers.’”

Earlier text

Ezra 9:1BSB

After these things had been accomplished, the leaders approached me and said, "The people of Israel, including the priests and Levites, have not kept themselves separate from the surrounding peoples whose abominations are like those of the Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians, and Amorites.

Significance

Entering the temple, Jesus drove out the sellers, declaring, "My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of robbers" (Luke 19:45-46) — a cleansing of the sanctuary from what defiled it. Ezra 9:1 records an earlier reformer's grief over a parallel defilement: the returned community had "not kept themselves separate from the surrounding peoples whose abominations" polluted the holy assembly, and Ezra responds with mourning, confession, and reform. The connection is by contrast within a shared concern for the purity of God's house: both confront the corruption of the covenant center, but the modes differ sharply — Ezra tears his own garments and intercedes as a fellow-sinner pleading for a guilty people (Ezra 9:6-15), whereas Jesus acts with unshared authority as the Lord come to His own temple in judgment (Malachi 3:1). Ezra cleanses from within as one of the defiled; Jesus cleanses from above as the Holy One. The telos is that authority: the temple He purifies He is also about to replace, for the true and final house of prayer is His own risen body (John 2:19-21), in whom access to God is opened not by separating from the nations but by gathering them in — the sanctuary no corruption can defile and no enemy can level.

Found via: John Gill, Exposition of the Entire Bible (1763)
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Contrast