WHITEWASHED, limed — from konia, dust or lime. ⚠ The image at Matthew 23:27 is sharper than 'pretty outside, rotten inside,' because of WHY tombs were limed: not to decorate them but to make them VISIBLE, so that passers-by could avoid them — contact with a grave made a person ritually unclean for seven days (Numbers 19:16), and a pilgrim who touched one could not keep the festival. So the whitewash was a WARNING, and the accusation is that a mark of contagion has been mistaken for ornament. Luke has the mirror-image insult: unmarked graves that people walk over without knowing (11:44). English 'whited sepulchre' as a byword for hypocrisy descends directly from the KJV's rendering here. → first discussed at Matt 23:27