Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 23:29

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and garnish the tombs of the righteous," — Matthew 23:29 (ASV)

You build the tombs... — Four conspicuous monuments of this kind are seen to the present day at the base of the Mount of Olives, in the so-called Valley of Jehoshaphat. Their architecture, with its mixture of debased Doric and Egyptian styles, leads archaeologists to assign them to the period of the Herodian dynasty. These may, therefore, have been the very sepulchres of which our Lord spoke and to which He may have pointed. They currently bear the names of Zechariah, Absalom, Jehoshaphat, and St. James, but there is no evidence that these names were given to them when they were built, and the narratives of earlier travelers vary in reporting them.

It is worth noting, however, that of these four names, Zechariah is the only one who belonged to a prophet. The reference in Matthew 23:35 to the death of a martyred prophet with that name makes it probable that the name was suggested, as it were, by the monument itself. The Pharisees were lavishing their wealth and skill on this tomb at the very time they were about to imbrue their hands in the blood of One who was, even in the judgment of many of their own class, both a “prophet” and a “righteous” man.

Garnish —Better, adorn—as, for example, with columns, cornices, paintings, or bas-reliefs. Even these acts, natural and legitimate in themselves, were part of the “hypocrisy” or “unreality” of the Pharisees. They did not understand, and therefore could not rightly honor, the life of a prophet or a just man. They might have learned something from the saying of a teacher of their own in the Jerusalem Talmud, that “there is no need to adorn the sepulchres of the righteous, for their words are their monuments.” In a somewhat similar vein, the Roman historian wrote: “As the faces of men are frail and perishable, so are the works of art that represent their faces; but the form of their character is eternal, and this we can retain in memory, and set forth to others, not by external matter and skill of art, but by our own character and acts” (Tacitus, Agricola, approximately 46).