Matthew21chapter 21

Passover swelled the city enormously. Josephus gives figures for the pilgrim crowds that are certainly inflated, but every source agrees the population multiplied and the surrounding villages filled up. Rome knew it too: the governor came up from the coast with extra troops for the festival, because Passover celebrated a liberation from an empire.

The entry was staged to be read. Riding a donkey rather than a horse quoted Zechariah's prophecy of a king coming humble and mounted on a colt. The branches and the cloaks on the road were how a crowd greeted a victor, and the shout of Hosanna comes from Psalm 118, part of the set of psalms pilgrims sang on the way up.

The money changers had a reason to be where they were, and the reason explains the anger. The temple tax had to be paid in a particular coinage, and pilgrims arrived carrying the currency of a dozen provinces, so exchange was necessary. Animals for sacrifice had to pass inspection, so buying an approved one on site was easier than driving a lamb from Galilee. But the trade was set up in the Court of the Gentiles — the one part of the complex a non-Jew was allowed to enter, and the only place on earth where a Gentile could come to pray. It had been turned into a market.

The tenant parable describes an ordinary arrangement. Absentee landlords owned large Galilean estates and leased them to tenant farmers for a share of the crop, collected by agents. Disputes over that share were common, and violence against collectors was not unknown.