Mark11chapter 11

Riding into the city on a donkey rather than a horse quoted Zechariah's picture of a king coming humble. The cloaks and branches on the road were how crowds greeted a victor, and the shout came from Psalm 118, one of the psalms pilgrims sang going up to the feast.

Mark's note that it was not the season for figs is not a slip; he puts it in deliberately. Fig trees in that country put out small early fruit alongside the leaves before the main crop, so a tree in full leaf advertised food it did not have.

The temple was a vast walled platform with graded courts. The outermost, the Court of the Gentiles, was the only part a non-Jew could enter, and a stone barrier with warning inscriptions — two of which have been found — threatened death to any foreigner who went further in. That outer court is where the sellers had set up, because pilgrims arriving from across the empire needed to change their coinage into the currency the temple accepted and to buy animals certified fit for sacrifice.

Mark alone records that Jesus would not let anyone carry goods through the courts — people used the platform as a shortcut across the city — and Mark alone quotes Isaiah's full line: a house of prayer for all the nations. His Gentile readers were the nations in question.