Ye 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, the architecture of which, with its mixture of debased Doric and Egyptian, leads archæologists to assign them to the period of the Herodian dynasty. These may, therefore, well have been the very sepulchres of which our Lord spoke, and to which, it may be, He pointed. They bear at present the names of Zechariah, Absalom, Jehoshaphat, and St. James; but there is no evidence that these were given to them when they were built, and the narratives of earlier travellers vary in reporting them. It may be noticed, however, that of these four names, Zechariah is the only one that belonged to a prophet, and the reference to the death of a martyr-prophet of that name in Matthew 23:35, makes it probable that the name may have been, as it were, suggested by the monument on which the Pharisees were lavishing their wealth and their skill at the very time when 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, e.g., 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 honour, the life of a prophet or just man. They might have learnt 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 somewhat of the same strain wrote the Roman historian: “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, c. 46).