Matthew Chapter 23 verse 35 Holy Bible

ASV Matthew 23:35

that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of Abel the righteous unto the blood of Zachariah son of Barachiah, whom ye slew between the sanctuary and the altar.
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BBE Matthew 23:35

So that on you may come all the blood of the upright on the earth, from the blood of upright Abel to the blood of Zachariah, son of Barachiah, whom you put to death between the Temple and the altar.
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DARBY Matthew 23:35

so that all righteous blood shed upon the earth should come upon *you*, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.
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KJV Matthew 23:35

That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.
read chapter 23 in KJV

WBT Matthew 23:35


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WEB Matthew 23:35

that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zachariah son of Barachiah, whom you killed between the sanctuary and the altar.
read chapter 23 in WEB

YLT Matthew 23:35

that on you may come all the righteous blood being poured out on the earth from the blood of Abel the righteous, unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the sanctuary and the altar:
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Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 35. - That upon you may come (ὅπως ἔλθῃ). This phrase does not express a simple consequence, neither can it mean "in such a way that" - explanations which have been given by some commentators to avoid a seeming difficulty in the final sense; but it is to be translated, as usually, in order that, ut veniat. God, foreseeing the issues of their evil heart, puts in their way occasions which will aid his vengeance and accelerate the time of their punishment. He lets them work out their own destruction by committing an unpardonable sin. He does not force them into this course of conduct; they can resist the opportunity if they will; but he knows they will not do so, and the visitation becomes judgment. To have a man's blood upon one's head is to be held guilty of the crime of murder, and to be liable to make the required atonement for it. So in their blind fury, taking the punishment on themselves, the Jews a little later cried, "His blood been us, and on our children!" (Matthew 27:25). Righteous blood. So in the Old Testament we often find such expressions as "innocent blood" (2 Kings 21:16; 2 Kings 24:4; Jeremiah 26:15); "blood of the just" (Lamentations 4:13); comp. Revelation 6:10 and Revelation 18:24, where it is written that in Babylon "was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all them that were slain upon the earth." Righteous Abel. The first of the murdered, the prototype of the death of Christ and of all good men who have died for truth, religion, and justice (Genesis 4:8; 1 John 3:12). The catalogue of such is long and terrible. Our Lord assigns a period to its dimensions, commencing with the first death mentioned in the Bible, and ending with the murder of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple (τοῦ ναοῦ, the sanctuary) and the altar. Our Lord is speaking of a past event well known to his hearers; but who this Zacharias was is much disputed. Origen mentions a tradition, otherwise entirely unsupported, that Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist, was the son of Barachiah, and was murdered in the temple. But the story looks as if it was made to relieve the difficulty of identification; neither, as far as we know, was he a prophet. Zechariah, the minor prophet, was the son of Berechiah; but we read nothing of his being slain in the temple or elsewhere. It is true that Josephus ('Bell. Jud.,' 4:05. 4) tells how a "Zacharias, son of Baruch," an honourable man, was slain by the zealots in the temple. But this murder took place A.D. , and our Lord could not number it among past crimes, or speak of it as an event familiar to those who heard him. The only other prophet of this name in the Bible is one mentioned in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22, as stoned by the people at the command of Joash, in the court of the house of the Lord. "And when he died," it is added, "he said, The Lord look upon it, and require it." This makes his case correspond to that of Abel, the voice of whose blood cried unto God from the ground. He is also the last prophet whose death is recorded in the Old Testament, and the guilt of whose murder, the Jews say, was not purged till the temple was burned under Nebuchadnezzar. It seems to be a kind of proverbial saying which the Lord here uses, equivalent to "from the first murdered saint to the last," taking the arrangement of the Hebrew canon of Scripture, and regarding the Books of Chronicles as the conclusion of Jewish history. This (though it would exclude the murder of other prophets, e.g. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc.) would all be plain enough and quite appropriate to the context were it not that the Zechariah thus referred to was the son of Jehoiada, not of Barachias. But there are two solutions of this difficulty suggested; and, allowing either of these, we may confidently assert that the above-named prophet is the personage intended. (1) The words, "son of Barachias" may be an early interpolation, introduced by a copyist who was thinking of the minor prophet. They are omitted by the first correcter of the Sinaitic Manuscript, are not found in the parallel passage of St. Luke (Luke 11:51), and Jerome remarks that in the 'Gospel of the Nazarenes' was read "son of Joiada." (2) There may have been family reasons, unknown to us, why Zechariah was thus designated (see the commentators on our Lord's genealogy in St. Luke 3, especially on ver. 23, "son of Hell," ver. 27, "son of Salathiel," and ver. 36, "son of Cainan"). Or Jehoiada may have had two names, as so many Jews had. Indeed, the two appellations are not altogether dissimilar in meaning, Jehoiada signifying "Jehovah knoweth," and Barachiah, "Jehovah blesseth." Or again, Barachiah may have been the father of Zechariah, and Jehoiada the more famous grandfather. It has been suggested (by Morison, in loc.) that one of the monuments recently erected in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem was dedicated to Zacharias. Such a one still bears his name. Hence Christ's allusion is very natural after his statement in ver. 29. The scene of the murder was the open space in the priests' court, between the holy place and the great altar of sacrifice. The sanctity of this spot made the crime abnormally atrocious.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(35) The blood of Zacharias son of Barachias.--A very memorable martyrdom is recorded in 2Chronicles 24:20-22, in which a prophet, named Zechariah, was stoned "in the court of the house of the Lord, at the commandment of the king." That Zacharias was, however, the son of Jehoiada; and the only "Zechariah the son of Barachias" in the Old Testament, is the minor prophet whose writings occupy the last place but one among the prophetic books of the Old Testament. Of his death we know nothing, and it is not probable, had he been slain in the manner here described, that it would have passed unrecorded. The death of the son of Jehoiada, on the other hand, is not only recorded, as above in 2 Chronicles 24, but had become the subject of popular legends. The blood of the prophet, it was said in the Talmud, would not dry up. It was still bubbling up when Nebuzaradan, the Chaldean commander (Jeremiah 39:9) took the Temple. No sacrifices availed to stay it, not even the blood of thousands of slaughtered priests. Wild as the story is, it shows, as does the so-called tomb of Zacharias, the impression which that death had made on the minds of men, and explains why it was chosen by our Lord as a representative example. The substitution of Barachias for Jehoiada may be accounted for as the mistake of a transcriber, led by the association of the two names, like that of Jeremy for Zechariah in Matthew 27:9 (where see Note). In the Sinaitic MS. the words "son of Barachiah" are omitted, but this betrays the hand of a corrector cutting the knot of the difficulty. The assumptions (1) that Jehoiada may have borne Barachiah as a second name, (2) or that he may have had a son of that name, and been really the grandfather of the martyr, are obviously hypotheses invented for the occasion, without a shadow of evidence. Singularly enough, Josephus (Wars, iv. 5, ? 4) recounts the murder of a "Zecharias, the son of Baruch," i.e., Barachiah, as perpetrated in the Temple by the Zealots just before the destruction of Jerusalem. It is possible that this also may not have been without its weight in so linking the two names together in men's minds as to mislead the memory as to the parentage of the older prophet. The list of conjectures is not complete unless we add that one of the Apocryphal Gospels (The Protevangelion of James, chap. 16) records the death of Zacharias, the father of the Baptist, as slain by Herod in the Temple, and near the altar, and that some have supposed that he was the son of Barachias referred to.Between the temple and the altar--i.e., between the sanctuary (the word is the same as in Matthew 26:61; John 2:19)--the Holy of Holies--and the altar of burnt offerings that stood outside it. . . .