Say to this mountain

Let us review what we know about the narrative content of Mark 11. The author sets up the chapter with Jesus’ Messianic entry into Jerusalem. This procession ends in a quite underwhelming manner as Jesus entered the temple late in the evening to observe the operations of the temple. As Brown puts it, the closure “is a surprisingly pedestrian finale to Jesus’ messianic action of riding up to Jerusalem on a colt in symbolic fulfillment of Zech 9:9” (82). Before Jesus would have another chance in the temple, he cursed a non-defective tree en route. In the temple, Jesus disturbed the typical daily operations by overturning tables and restricting movement in some parts of the temple. While doing all this, he alluded to two major Old Testament prophets. Later on the same day, Jesus left the city, and the disciples noticed that the cursed fig tree had withered. In reply, Jesus says (11:22-25):  

The work of Esther Miquel with which we have extensively interacted already explained much of Mark 11, but there yet remains some knotty portions of Mark 11 requiring text-faithful explanations. In his contribution to the issue, J.R.D Kirk stresses the importance of bringing the full context of Markan Jesus’ Old Testament allusions to bear on one’s reading of Mark 11.  While aggressively disturbing the typical temple operations, Jesus taught the audience by combining two references from the Hebrew Bible when he said, “Is it not written: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of robbers’” (Mark 11:17).  The referenced Old Testament passages are Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11. Kirk warns against reading these citations in isolation from their respective broader contexts. Instead, he argues that if one reads those citations of Jesus as a Tanakh-literate first century Jew would have done, one could understand the portions of Mark 11 that seem problematic.