At Qumran, beside the Dead Sea, Jewish sectarians were so disgusted with this corruption of their most sacred institutions that they had withdrawn from mainstream society, convinced that God would soon destroy the temple and replace it with a purified shrine not made by human hands. So Jesus was not the only person to regard the temple as a “den of thieves,” and his violent demonstration, which probably cost him his life, would have been understood by the authorities as a threat to the political order.
