A Token of Appreciate

(11) Hashem spoke to Moses, saying: (12) When you take a census of the Israelite men according to their army enrollment, each shall pay Hashem a ransom for himself on being enrolled, that no plague may come upon them through their being enrolled. (13) This is what everyone who is entered in the records shall pay: a half-shekel by the sanctuary weight—twenty gerah s to the shekel—a half-shekel as an offering to Hashem. (14) Everyone who is entered in the records, from the age of twenty years up, shall give Hashem's offering: (15) the rich shall not pay more and the poor shall not pay less than half a shekel when giving Hashem's offering as expiation for your persons. (16) You shall take the expiation money from the Israelites and assign it to the service of the Tent of Meeting; it shall serve the Israelites as a reminder before Hashem, as expiation for your persons.

(1) On the first of Adar they make a public announcement about the shekels....

(1) What did they do with the appropriation? They bring with it the daily burnt-offerings (tamidim) and the additional burnt-offerings (musafim) and their libations, the omer and the two loaves and the showbread and all the other public offerings. Those who guard the aftergrowths of the seventh year take their wages out of the appropriation from the chamber. Rabbi Yose says: [if a man wished] he could volunteer to watch without payment. But they said to him: you too admit that they can only be offered out of public funds.

(2) The [red] heifer and the scapegoat and the strip of scarlet came out of the appropriation of the chamber. The ramp for the [red] heifer and the ramp for the scapegoat and the strip of scarlet which was between its horns, and [the maintenance of] the pool of water and the wall of the city and its towers and all the needs of the city came out of the remainder in the chamber. Abba Shaul says: the ramp for the [red] cow the high priests made out of their own [means].

(3) On the fifteenth of [Adar] they would set up tables [of money changers] in the provinces. On the twenty-fifth they set them up in the Temple. When [the tables] were set up in the Temple, they began to exact pledges [from those who had not paid]. From whom did they exact pledges? From Levites and Israelites, converts and freed slaves, but not women or slaves or minors. Any minor on whose behalf his father has begun to pay the shekel, may not discontinue it again. But they did not exact pledges from the priests, because of the ways of peace.