The King James Version says “robbers.” The Hebrew means men of violence, and the thread runs from Isaiah’s temple courts through Jeremiah’s gate and Ezekiel’s vision to the Book of Mormon.
When Jeremiah stood in the gate of the Lord’s house, he asked one question that Jesus would quote six hundred years later:
“Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, even I have seen it, saith the LORD.” (Jeremiah 7:11)
Most of us picture pickpockets, or the money changers Jesus drove out. The word Jeremiah used is much heavier than that, and once you see it, a thread lights up across the whole Old Testament and into the Book of Mormon. This article follows that thread.
The word: parits
The Hebrew word behind “robbers” is parits. Strong’s defines it as violent, a tyrant. It comes from a root that means to break through. The King James translators rendered it three ways: destroyer, ravenous, and robber.
It appears only six times in the Old Testament:
- “the paths of the destroyer” (Psalm 17:4)
- the “ravenous beast” that will not go up on the holy way (Isaiah 35:9)
- “a den of robbers” (Jeremiah 7:11)
- “the robbers shall enter into it, and defile it” (Ezekiel 7:22)
- “a son that is a robber, a shedder of blood” (Ezekiel 18:10)
- “the robbers of thy people shall exalt themselves… but they shall fall” (Daniel 11:14)
Every one of them is about violence. And look at the last one: Daniel’s robbers are “of thy people.” They come from inside.
The word for “den” matters too. It’s the ordinary Hebrew word for a cave. A den of robbers is the cave where bandits hide between raids. They don’t rob in the cave. They rob out on the road, and the cave is where they’re safe.
Jeremiah’s question, then, is sharper than it sounds in English: Has the Lord’s house become a hideout for violent men?
Isaiah saw it first
A century before Jeremiah, Isaiah addressed his whole book “concerning Judah and Jerusalem” (Isaiah 1:1), and his first chapter takes us straight into the temple courts:
“When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts? Bring no more vain oblations… And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.” (Isaiah 1:12–13, 15)
Then he says who’s in charge: “How is the faithful city become an harlot! it was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it; but now murderers… Thy princes are rebellious, and companions of thieves” (1:21, 23).
Worship in the courts. Blood on the hands that are raised in prayer. Princes who keep company with thieves. That’s the den, a hundred years before Jeremiah named it.
Isaiah’s cure is the cure Jeremiah preached: “Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil” (1:16). The Church’s own footnote on that verse sends the reader to Jeremiah 7:3. The two sermons belong together.
The sermon in the gate
The Lord sent Jeremiah to “stand in the gate of the LORD’s house” (Jeremiah 7:2), right where the worshippers walked in, and told him to answer their slogan:
“Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, are these.” (7:4)
Who taught the people that slogan? The Church’s Scripture Helps for this week answers plainly: many people were misled by the “lying words” of their leaders, who taught that having the temple in their midst would protect them no matter how they lived.
Then the Lord lists how they actually lived, and what they said when they came to the temple afterward:
“Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal… And come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations?” (7:9–10)
“We are delivered to do all these abominations.” They came to the temple to feel safe, then went back out and did it again. The cave, and the road.
Verse 6 had already said what kind of men these were. The Lord’s condition for staying in the land was that they “shed not innocent blood in this place.” These were violent men using the Lord’s house for cover.
The Scripture Helps draws the same conclusion in its own words: if the people would not repent, not even the temple, which had become “a den of robbers,” would save them. That’s the Church’s own manual, describing the temple of Jeremiah’s day.
The warning that follows is the most sobering line in the sermon: “Go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh, where I set my name at the first, and see what I did to it for the wickedness of my people Israel” (7:12). Shiloh had housed the tabernacle for generations. It was gone. A house with the Lord’s name on it can still be lost.
Where the den’s protection came from
Two chapters earlier, Jeremiah had named how the system worked:
“The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?” (5:31)
The Church’s footnote on the “lying words” of 7:8 points the reader back to that verse. False prophets, priests ruling by their means, and a people who liked it that way.
Four chapters later, the Lord gave it a name:
“A conspiracy is found among the men of Judah, and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem.” (11:9)
And when Jeremiah preached the temple sermon again, we learn who wanted him dead:
“The priests and the prophets and all the people took him, saying, Thou shalt surely die.” (26:8)
The men in charge of the temple tried to kill the prophet who warned them about the temple. Earlier, Pashur, a priest “who was also chief governor in the house of the LORD,” had already beaten him and locked him in the stocks by the temple gate (20:1–2). The princes and some of the elders saved Jeremiah’s life by citing the precedent of Micah (26:16–19). The prophet Urijah, who preached the same message, wasn’t saved. The king “slew him with the sword” (26:23).
Ezekiel watched it from Babylon
Ezekiel was a priest carried captive to Babylon while Jeremiah was still preaching in Jerusalem. The Lord showed him the same temple from far away, and he used Jeremiah’s word.
“My face will I turn also from them, and they shall pollute my secret place: for the robbers shall enter into it, and defile it. Make a chain: for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence.” (Ezekiel 7:22–23)
The Church’s footnote on Jeremiah 7:11 sends the reader to this verse. Same word, same house, same violence. And Ezekiel added what it would cost: “the law shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the ancients” (7:26).
The next chapter tells us who came to hear Ezekiel’s vision: “the elders of Judah sat before me” (8:1). The Lord took him in vision through the temple’s hidden rooms and showed him that the house of Judah had “filled the land with violence” (8:17).
Then came the judgment, and where it started. A man clothed in linen, with a writer’s inkhorn, was sent through Jerusalem to “set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof” (9:4). Those with the mark were spared. And the order to the others was: “begin at my sanctuary” (9:6). They began with the elders standing before the house.
(Who the man in linen is, and why he carries an inkhorn instead of a weapon, is its own article, coming soon.)
The Book of Mormon names the same men
Lehi left Jeremiah’s Jerusalem carrying Jeremiah’s words on the brass plates (1 Nephi 5:13). His descendants lived the same pattern, and Mormon and Moroni wrote it down for us.
When Alma handed the sacred records to his son Helaman, he gave him a strange commandment about the Jaredite record: “retain all their oaths, and their covenants, and their agreements in their secret abominations” (Alma 37:27). Keep them, but don’t publish them. Teach the people “their wickedness and their murders and their abominations” (37:29), and nothing about how the oaths worked.
Notice the words: oaths, covenants, agreements. We read secret combinations as a counterfeit of covenant-making, a dark mirror of the temple. The faithful make covenants with God in His house. The robbers make covenants with each other in secret, and the purpose is murder and gain.
Alma tells us what those men did to the prophets: “they murdered all the prophets of the Lord who came among them to declare unto them concerning their iniquities,” and “thus the judgments of God did come upon these workers of darkness and secret combinations” (37:30).
And where did the Gadianton robbers find their strength? Not out in the wilderness. Among the Nephites, the covenant people, who “did build them up and support them… and had seduced the more part of the righteous until they had come down to believe in their works and partake of their spoils, and to join with them in their secret murders and combinations” (Helaman 6:38).
The more part of the righteous. Daniel’s “robbers of thy people”, again.
Moroni wrote the warning to our day directly: “whatsoever nation shall uphold such secret combinations, to get power and gain, until they shall spread over the nation, behold, they shall be destroyed” (Ether 8:22).
Jesus cleaned the house
The Savior walked into the temple in Jerusalem, overturned the tables, and quoted two prophets in one breath:
“It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.” (Matthew 21:13)
The Scripture Helps notes that He joined the language of Jeremiah 7:11 with Isaiah 56:7 when He cleansed the temple. The Greek word in Matthew is lēstēs, a bandit, a man of violence. It’s the word John uses for Barabbas: “Now Barabbas was a robber” (John 18:40). The crowd chose the bandit and crucified the Lord of the house.
The house made clean
The thread doesn’t end in the cave. The prophets who named the robbers also saw the house made clean.
Isaiah promised a holy way where “no lion shall be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon” (Isaiah 35:9). That “ravenous beast” is our word parits again. On the Lord’s own road, the violent can’t follow.
Zechariah closed his book with a temple where even the cooking pots are holy, “and in that day there shall be no more the Canaanite in the house of the LORD of hosts” (Zechariah 14:21). The Hebrew word for Canaanite can also mean a trader, which makes the verse read like a promise the Savior kept when He drove the traders out.
And Malachi saw the end of it in the same pair Jeremiah accused: “Then shall the offering of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasant unto the LORD, as in the days of old, and as in former years” (Malachi 3:4). The risen Lord gave those words to the Nephites (3 Nephi 24:4). The pair that harbored the conspiracy is the pair whose offering the Lord accepts again.
A mirror before a window
It would be easy to read all of this about somebody else: the priests of Jeremiah’s Jerusalem, Ezekiel’s elders, the Gadiantons. The Lord doesn’t let us.
Speaking of the last days, He told the Prophet Joseph Smith: “upon my house shall it begin, and from my house shall it go forth, saith the Lord; First among those among you… who have professed to know my name and have not known me” (D&C 112:25–26).
That’s Ezekiel’s “begin at my sanctuary,” given again in our dispensation. And notice how the Lord sorts the people: not by who belongs to the house, but by who knows Him.
Elder David A. Bednar drew that same line in October 2024. He taught that apostasy can happen at two levels, institutional and individual, and that “at the institutional level, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will not be lost through apostasy or taken from the earth.” The house will stand. The sorting happens person by person.
That doesn’t mean the den can’t exist. It means it can’t win. The Lord has said what happens to anyone who uses holy things for cover: “when we undertake to cover our sins… the heavens withdraw themselves… and when it is withdrawn, Amen to the priesthood or the authority of that man” (D&C 121:37). The den can fool people. It can’t fool heaven, and the Lord’s own test still stands: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16).
So the first question Jeremiah 7 asks us isn’t who are the robbers? It’s the question the man in linen was sent to answer: who sighs and cries for the abominations, and who has learned to live comfortably beside them? And under that one, the question the whole book of Jeremiah keeps asking: do you trust the house, or do you know the Lord of the house?
Where this lands
- The word is parits: violent men, not pickpockets.
- Isaiah saw blood on hands raised in prayer, and princes who kept company with thieves.
- Jeremiah’s leaders taught that the temple would protect them however they lived, and the Church’s own Scripture Helps calls those “lying words.”
- The men who ran the temple tried to kill the prophet who warned them.
- Ezekiel saw the robbers defile the sanctuary, and judgment begin there.
- The Book of Mormon shows the same men inside the covenant people, bound by counterfeit covenants.
- The Savior cleaned the house, and the prophets saw it made holy again.
Before next Sunday, try one thing. Read Jeremiah 7:1–15 and Ezekiel 9:4 together. Then ask the Lord honestly which side of that mark you’re on, and what He would have you sigh and cry about.
“Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, even I have seen it, saith the LORD.” — Jeremiah 7:11
The Seven Ways People Read Isaiah. Which One Are You?
Ken Krogue is a co-founder of The Covenant Project and has been deeply searching Isaiah for more than ten years. He writes with two AI research partners, Orson (Claude) and Nathan (ChatGPT), and approves every word.
