Context No. 703 of 4322 · 2 Kings

2 Kings 12:6-16: in context

6But it was so, that in the twenty-third year of King Jehoash the priests had not repaired the damage to the house. 7Then King Jehoash called for Jehoiada the priest, and for the other priests, and said to them, “Why aren’t you repairing the damage to the house? Now therefore take no more money from your treasurers, but deliver it for repair of the damage to the house.” 8The priests consented that they should take no more money from the people, and not repair the damage to the house. 9But Jehoiada the priest took a chest and bored a hole in its lid, and set it beside the altar, on the right side as one comes into the LORD’s house; and the priests who kept the threshold put all the money that was brought into the LORD’s house into it. 10When they saw that there was much money in the chest, the king’s scribe and the high priest came up, and they put it in bags and counted the money that was found in the LORD’s house. 11They gave the money that was weighed out into the hands of those who did the work, who had the oversight of the LORD’s house; and they paid it out to the carpenters and the builders who worked on the LORD’s house, 12and to the masons and the stone cutters, and for buying timber and cut stone to repair the damage to the LORD’s house, and for all that was laid out for the house to repair it. 13But there were not made for the LORD’s house cups of silver, snuffers, basins, trumpets, any vessels of gold or vessels of silver, of the money that was brought into the LORD’s house; 14for they gave that to those who did the work, and repaired the LORD’s house with it. 15Moreover they didn’t demand an accounting from the men into whose hand they delivered the money to give to those who did the work; for they dealt faithfully. 16The money for the trespass offerings and the money for the sin offerings was not brought into the LORD’s house. It was the priests’.

Joash became king of Judah as a boy, hidden from a murderous queen and set on the throne by the priest Jehoiada, and one of his projects as a grown king was to repair the temple. He arranged for the dedicated silver to fund the work. But this passage opens years later, in his twenty-third year, with the temple still not repaired. The priests had been collecting the money and the building had not been fixed; the funds went in and the work did not come out.

So Joash changes the system. He tells the priests to stop handling the collection, and Jehoiada bores a hole in the lid of a chest and sets it by the altar. Money goes in there; when it is full, the king's scribe and the high priest count it together and hand it straight to the overseers, who pay the carpenters and masons and buy the timber and stone. Two things make the new arrangement work. It is transparent, counted in the open by two men. And the workmen are trusted: no reckoning was required of the men who received the money, the text says, because they dealt faithfully. The reform was a counted chest for the collection and honest hands at the work, and the honest hands were reliable enough that no audit was needed.

The workmen were trusted with no accounting because they simply dealt faithfully. Would the money and time handed to me survive with no audit, or do I need watching to do right?

Sources

2 Chronicles 24: the parallel account of Joash and Jehoiada, and the reign's later turn
2 Kings 22:3-7: Josiah's later temple repair, its workmen also trusted without an accounting, because they dealt faithfully
Exodus 30:11-16: the atonement money of the sanctuary, the kind of dedicated silver behind such repairs