A priest drills a hole in the lid of a wooden chest and sets it beside the altar, and money for repairing the house of the LORD starts to gather there (2 Kings 12:9). The same story is retold in 2 Chronicles 24, where the chest stands at the gate and “all the princes and all the people rejoiced, and brought in, and cast into the chest, until they had made an end.” It is a small, ordinary object, and the passages show an equally ordinary kind of giving: steady, open, shared by many hands, and counted honestly by the Levites and the king’s scribe.
5 verses
But Jehoiada the priest took a chest, and bored a hole in the lid of it, and set it beside the altar, on the right side as one cometh into the house of the LORD: and the priests that kept the door put therein all the money that was brought into the house of the LORD.
And at the king's commandment they made a chest, and set it without at the gate of the house of the LORD.
And they made a proclamation through Judah and Jerusalem, to bring in to the LORD the collection that Moses the servant of God laid upon Israel in the wilderness.
And all the princes and all the people rejoiced, and brought in, and cast into the chest, until they had made an end.
Now it came to pass, that at what time the chest was brought unto the king's office by the hand of the Levites, and when they saw that there was much money, the king's scribe and the high priest's officer came and emptied the chest, and took it, and carried it to his place again. Thus they did day by day, and gathered money in abundance.
Matthew George Easton, 1897
(Heb. ’aron, generally rendered “ark”), the coffer into which the contributions for the repair of the temple were put (2 Kings 12:9, 10; 2 Chr. 24:8, 10, 11). In Gen. 50:26 it is rendered “coffin.” In Ezek. 27:24 a different Hebrew word, genazim (plur.), is used. It there means “treasure-chests.”
William Smith, 1884
By this word are translated in the Authorized Version two distinct Hebrew terms:
(1.) Aron ; this is invariably used for the ark of the covenant, and, with two exceptions, for that only. The two exceptions alluded to are (a) the "coffin" in which the bones of Joseph were carried from Egypt, (Genesis 50:26) and (b) the "chest" in which Jehoiada the priest collected the alms for the repairs of the temple. (2 Kings 12:9,10; 2 Chronicles 24:8-11)
(2.) Genazim , "chests." (Ezekiel 27:24) only.