Malachi 3:3
1 “Behold*, I am about to send my messenger, who will clear the way before me. Indeed, the Lord you are seeking will suddenly come to his temple, and the messenger of the covenant, whom you long for, is certainly coming,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. 2 Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can keep standing when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire, like a launderer’s soap. 3 He will act like a refiner and purifier of silver and will cleanse the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then they will offer the Lord a proper offering. 4 The offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in former times and years past.
John 2:14
12 After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples, and they stayed there a few days. 13 Now the Jewish Feast of Passover was near, so Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 He found in the temple courts those who were selling oxen and sheep and doves, and the money changers sitting at tables. 15 So he made a whip of cords and drove them all out of the temple courts, with the sheep and the oxen. He scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. 16 To those who sold the doves he said, “Take these things away from here! Do not make my Father’s house a marketplace!” 17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will devour me.”
Notes and References
"... Texts such as 1QS 8 demonstrate that the Qumran ‘council of the community’ understood itself as a spiritual temple that offered spiritual sacrifices to God, with priests forming the inner (‘Holy of Holies’). This self-definition arose out the community’s dissatisfaction with the Jerusalem priesthood and reflects its anticipation of a restoration and purification of the temple cult by the eschatological priest. Such ideas are likewise reflected in John 2.13-22. In 2.14-17, Jesus is portrayed as the refiner of Israel’s corrupted temple, which may be meant to evoke imagery from Malachi 3.1-4. Malachi foretells a day when the Lord will enter the temple and send a priestly figure—‘the messenger of the covenant’ — to turn the way of the people back to the Lord and to purify the temple cult, so that proper worship might once again take place in Jerusalem. Jesus’ actions in the temple may be understood against this backdrop of a coming priestly figure, whose purpose is to restore Israel’s cultic communion with her God ..."
Cirafesi, Wally V. The Priestly Portrait of Jesus in the Gospel of John in Light of 1QS, 1QSa, and 1QSb (pp. 83-105) Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism, 2011