The Feast of Trumpets · Yom Teruah · The Hebrew Feasts
ASVThe Feast of Trumpets
On the first day of the seventh month, a trumpet sounds and the Torah names no reason. Every other feast in Leviticus 23 says what it remembers or what it requires. Trumpets alone is just the sound, and a rest, and a holy day. Jews have kept the day for millennia as Rosh Hashanah, the new year; readers of this site's own tradition have heard a resurrection trumpet in it. Both are given here, named as what they are.
The Day With No Reason
Leviticus 23:23-25 and Numbers 29:1-6, read for what they say and what they do not
And Jehovah spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, shall be a solemn rest unto you, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation. Ye shall do no servile work; and ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto Jehovah.A solemn rest, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation, and an offering by fire. No reason given.
And in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, ye shall have a holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work: it is a day of blowing of trumpets unto you. And ye shall offer a burnt-offering for a sweet savor unto Jehovah: one young bullock, one ram, seven he-lambs a year old without blemish; and their meal-offering, fine flour mingled with oil, three tenth parts for the bullock, two tenth parts for the ram, and one tenth part for every lamb of the seven lambs; and one he-goat for a sin-offering, to make atonement for you; besides the burnt-offering of the new moon, and the meal-offering thereof, and the continual burnt-offering and the meal-offering thereof, and their drink-offerings, according unto their ordinance, for a sweet savor, an offering made by fire unto Jehovah.The offering list: a bullock, a ram, seven lambs, a sin offering, all beside the month's own new-moon offering.
Read Leviticus 23 straight through and a pattern holds until this verse breaks it. Passover remembers the exodus. Firstfruits presents the harvest. The Day of Atonement is built entirely around a sin offering. Tabernacles states its own purpose in the same chapter: “that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel to dwell in booths.” Trumpets gets none of that. It is a rest, a blast, and a holy day, and the text stops there.
The day is also the only feast in the chapter tied to a new moon. Every month opened with its own new-moon offering (Numbers 28:11-15); the seventh month’s new moon gets a feast day on top of the ordinary one, and Numbers 29:6 says so outright: the day’s offerings stand “beside the burnt-offering of the new moon.” Whatever the day means, it means it on the calendar’s own hinge point, the start of the civil year.
There is no mention of trumpets in the Hebrew text of the Law in connection with the day. However, there is no reason to doubt the tradition that the day was distinguished by a general blowing of trumpets throughout the land, and that the kind of trumpet generally used for the purpose was the curved horn of an animal or a cornet of metal, such as was used at Sinai Exo 19:16, and on the Day of Jubilee Lev 25:9.
Albert Barnes· Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments, 1832Evangelical
Leviticus 23:24
Barnes holds both things true at once, and this page follows him: the Hebrew text of the Law does not name a trumpet or a shofar at this verse (the word is teruah, a blast or shout), and the unbroken tradition that a shofar sounded the day is not therefore groundless. Silence in the text is not the same as absence in practice.
Teruah and the Shofar
the word the day is named for, and the horn tradition says sounded it
The feast’s own Hebrew name comes from a noise word before an instrument word. In תְּרוּעָה teruah (H8643) the lexicon glosses “clamor, i.e. acclamation of joy or a battle-cry; especially clangor of trumpets, as an alarum,” and the King James translators rendered the same root as “alarm,” “shout(-ing),” “joy,” and “jubile” elsewhere in Scripture. Yom Teruah, this day’s own Hebrew name, is literally the Day of the Blast, or the Day of the Shout: a sound, named before any particular instrument is specified.
The instrument tradition assigns to that sound is the שׁוֹפָר shophar (H7782), the ram’s horn, glossed “a cornet (as giving a clear sound) or curved horn.” Its full canon-wide job, from Sinai to the walls of Jericho to the last trumpet, belongs to the site’s own instrument study, which draws the same distinction Barnes draws above: the horn that made the day’s sound is not the same instrument as the long straight silver trumpets (chatsotsrah) blown at ordinary new moons and used to summon the camp.
- Tishri 1The date, the seventh month's first day
- H8643teruah, the blast the day is named for
- H7782shophar, the horn tradition assigns
- 0stated reasons given in the text
The Day in the Story
Psalm 81's worship command, and the day Ezra read the Law on this exact date
Blow the trumpet at the new moon, At the full moon, on our feast-day. For it is a statute for Israel, An ordinance of the God of Jacob.A shofar and a calendar date in the same breath, outside the law codes: a statute, sung.
And Nehemiah, who was the governor, and Ezra the priest the scribe, and the Levites that taught the people, said unto all the people, This day is holy unto Jehovah your God; mourn not, nor weep. For all the people wept, when they heard the words of the law. Then he said unto them, Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto him for whom nothing is prepared; for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye grieved; for the joy of Jehovah is your strength.Ezra reads the Law on this exact date. The people weep. They are told to feast instead.
Psalm 81 is the one place outside Leviticus and Numbers that names a trumpet at a calendar date, and it does so as a sung command: blow it “at the new moon, at the full moon, on our feast-day,” because it is Israel’s own statute, not a matter of preference. Nehemiah 8 shows the command lived out, generations later. Ezra brings out the Law “upon the first day of the seventh month” (v.2): the Day of Trumpets itself, though the chapter never once says the word “trumpet.” The people weep, hearing how far they had drifted from what was read. Nehemiah and Ezra stop them: “this day is holy unto the LORD your God; mourn not, nor weep,” and then the line this site’s own tradition keeps returning to: “the joy of the LORD is your strength.”
Blow up the trumpet in the new moon. Announce the sacred month, the beginning of months, when the Lord brought his people out of the house of bondage. Clear and shrill let the summons be which calls all Israel to adore the Redeeming Lord. In the time appointed, on our solemn feast day. Obedience is to direct our worship, not whim and sentiment: God's appointment gives a solemnity to rites and times which no ceremonial pomp or hierarchical ordinance could confer.
Charles Spurgeon· The Treasury of David, Vol. 4, 1874Reformed Baptist
Psalm 81:3
For this was a statute for Israel, and a law of the God of Jacob. It was a precept binding upon all the tribes that a sacred season should be set apart to commemorate the Lord's mercy; and truly it was but the Lord's due, he had a right and a claim to such special homage.
Charles Spurgeon· The Treasury of David, Vol. 4, 1874Reformed Baptist
Psalm 81:4
Rosh Hashanah, Kept Now
how Jews name and keep this day today, reception honestly labeled
Jewish practice keeps this exact day as Rosh Hashanah, literally “head of the year,” the civil new year, marked by the sounding of the shofar in synagogue. MannaFest’s own verified Hebraic Context notes trace the reading directly: the Day of Trumpets is “now Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, announced by the ram’s-horn trumpet called a shofar,” citing the Mishnah, the first written code of Jewish oral law (compiled about AD 200). Its tractate on the day, Rosh Hashanah, opens by counting several new years on the Jewish calendar; the new year that begins on this date, the first of the seventh month, is the one that starts the civil and regnal year.
Nehemiah 8 is that same reception’s oldest anchor in the canon itself: Ezra reading the Law on this date, and the congregation told to feast rather than mourn, is read as the day’s enduring tone, carried forward into how the day is kept now.
What this reception is, and is notThe handling rule, applied
This is reception history: how the Jewish tradition has read and kept a date the Torah itself leaves unexplained. It is presented as living practice, honored on its own terms, not as MannaFest’s confession.
Nothing in Rosh Hashanah’s practice, as described here, touches an essential of the Christian faith. No essentials-flag is needed on this feast, and none is raised.
Where It Points
the last trumpet, the regathering trumpet, and the readings that name them
Behold, I tell you a mystery: We all shall not sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.'The last trumpet': definite article, no explanation given in the text.
For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven, with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first;A shout, an archangel's voice, and the trump of God: three sounds, one clause.
And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great trumpet shall be blown; and they shall come that were ready to perish in the land of Assyria, and they that were outcasts in the land of Egypt; and they shall worship Jehovah in the holy mountain at Jerusalem.A different job: not resurrection, but the regathering of the scattered to Jerusalem.
And he shall send forth his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.Jesus uses the same regathering image, for the same job Isaiah did.
None of these four verses names the Feast of Trumpets. What they share is a trumpet doing exactly the kind of work Numbers 10 and this feast both assign a trumpet: gathering people who could not otherwise be reached by a voice. Whether that shared job is a real echo of this specific feast, or simply the same instrument doing the same kind of work it always does in Scripture, is where readers divide.
On the reading this site carries elsewhere (see the Rapture), the spring feasts were fulfilled at Christ’s first coming and the fall feasts await His return: Trumpets read as the gathering, Atonement as Israel’s national repentance, Tabernacles as God dwelling with men. On this reading, “the last trumpet” of 1 Corinthians 15:52 and the “trump of God” of 1 Thessalonians 4:16 are heard against this feast’s own blast. Chuck Missler (The Rapture, 2014; The Book of Revelation) is the lead named voice for this reading on MannaFest’s own line. It is offered, as it is on the Rapture page itself, as “a framework and an expectation, not a date.”
Much of the church’s historic commentary, ancient and Reformed alike, reads “the last trumpet” and the “trump of God” as the single trumpet of the resurrection and says nothing about a tie to Israel’s autumn feast. That silence, held across a wide span of the tradition, is a real position in its own right: the connection is not obvious or universal even to readers who take the text at full strength.
The trumpet was sounded to convoke the people on solemn feasts, especially on the first day of the seventh month (the type of the completion of time; seven being the number for perfection; on the tenth of the same month was the atonement, and on the fifteenth the feast of tabernacles, commemorative of completed salvation out of the spiritual Egypt, compare Zec 14:18, 19)
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, 1871Reformed
1 Corinthians 15:52
JFB is worth noticing precisely because it draws the feast-typology line from a Reformed, non-dispensational seat: the reading that hears this feast in Paul’s “last trumpet” is not confined to one theological camp.
What this page does not settleRapture-timing belongs to its own page
Whether “the last trumpet” names Revelation’s seventh, this feast’s own trumpet, or (on one ancient reading) simply the signal that a battle is over, is argued in full, with every reading named and held, at The Trumpet and the Shofar. The four-timings debate for the rapture itself, pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation, pre-wrath, and post-tribulation, with its teachers named on every side, is argued in full at The Rapture. This page names the one question that belongs to it: whether Trumpets is the feast being echoed, and by whom that reading is held.
The Voices
with the work named
trump of God--the trumpet blast which usually accompanies God's manifestation in glory (Ex 19:16; Ps 47:5); here the last of the three accompaniments of His appearing: as the trumpet was used to convene God's people to their solemn convocations
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown· Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible, 1871Reformed
1 Thessalonians 4:16
The commentary on this feast divides the way the feast itself does: Barnes and Clarke read the Old Testament text carefully and honestly, naming what it says and what tradition supplies. Spurgeon reads Psalm 81 devotionally, as a call to obedience rather than sentiment. JFB, alone among the voices quoted here, draws the typological line from Paul’s trumpets back to this feast, from a Reformed seat rather than a dispensational one. No voice on this page treats the feast-typology question as settled, and neither does this page.
Where to Go Next
The calendar around this feast
- The Fall Feasts the umbrella this feast opens: Trumpets, Atonement, Tabernacles, in order.
- The Hebrew Feasts the whole calendar, all seven appointed times.
- The Day of Atonement ten days later, the fast that follows this blast.
The trumpet and where it points
- The Trumpet and the Shofar the instrument across the whole canon, and every reading of “the last trumpet.”
- The Rapture the four timings, argued in full, with every teacher named.
- The Jubilee the one trumpet in Scripture that cancels debts outright.
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