“A den of robbers”
It is written: 'My house will be called a house of prayer.' But you are making it 'a den of robbers.' (Matthew 21:13 BSB)
What it sounds like today
An accusation that the money-changers were overcharging: temple corruption as price-gouging.
The cultural key
Both halves are loaded quotations. 'House of prayer' is Isaiah 56:7, 'for all peoples': the market had colonized the Court of the Gentiles, the one space the nations could pray. 'Den of robbers' is Jeremiah 7:11, from the temple sermon in which Jeremiah warned that treating the temple as a safehouse while practicing injustice would end with its destruction, like Shiloh. And lēstēs means violent bandit or insurrectionist, not swindler; a den is not where robbers rob, but where they retreat to feel safe afterward.
Recovered meaning
The charge isn't cheating at the exchange tables; it's using the temple as a hideout: presuming God's house shields a life of injustice. Quoting Jeremiah 7 in the temple courts carried that sermon's unspoken ending: this house can fall.