The Feast of Trumpets · Yom Teruah · The Hebrew Feasts
BSBThe 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.
Summary
Yom Teruah, the Feast of Trumpets, falls on the first day of Israel's seventh month and is defined in the Torah by nothing but a sound: a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy rest. The text gives no stated reason, unlike every other feast around it. Jews keep the day now as Rosh Hashanah, the civil new year; this site's own tradition also hears a resurrection trumpet echoed in it, a reading named here as a reading.
- Leviticus 23:24 names the day teruah, a blast or shout, not shophar, the ram's horn: the noise is legislated before the instrument is assumed.
- The day sits on a new moon, the only feast in Leviticus 23 that does, and its offerings in Numbers 29 stack on top of the month's own.
- Nehemiah 8 shows the day kept in the wild: Ezra reads the Law on this exact date, the people weep, and are told instead to feast, because the joy of the LORD is their strength.
- Jewish practice keeps the day today as Rosh Hashanah, the new year, marked by the sounding of the shofar in synagogue.
- 1 Corinthians 15:52 and 1 Thessalonians 4:16 both attach the resurrection to a trumpet. Whether that trumpet is this feast's own is a real, disputed question, and the readings are named here rather than settled.
The Day With No Reason
Leviticus 23:23-25 and Numbers 29:1-6, read for what they say and what they do not
The LORD also said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say, ‘On the first day of the seventh month you are to have a day of rest, a sacred assembly announced by trumpet blasts. You must not do any regular work, but you are to present an offering made by fire to the LORD.’”A solemn rest, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy convocation, and an offering by fire. No reason given.
“On the first day of the seventh month, you are to hold a sacred assembly, and you must not do any regular work. This will be a day for you to sound the trumpets. As a pleasing aroma to the LORD, you are to present a burnt offering of one young bull, one ram, and seven male lambs a year old, all unblemished, together with their grain offerings of fine flour mixed with oil—three-tenths of an ephah with the bull, two-tenths of an ephah with the ram, and a tenth of an ephah with each of the seven male lambs. Include one male goat as a sin offering to make atonement for you. These are in addition to the monthly and daily burnt offerings with their prescribed grain offerings and drink offerings. They are a pleasing aroma, an offering made by fire to the LORD.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
Sound the ram’s horn at the New Moon, and at the full moon on the day of our Feast. For this 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.
Nehemiah the governor, Ezra the priest and scribe, and the Levites who were instructing the people said to all of them, “This day is holy to the LORD your God. Do not mourn or weep.” For all the people were weeping as they heard the words of the Law. Then Nehemiah told them, “Go and eat what is rich, drink what is sweet, and send out portions to those who have nothing prepared, since today is holy to our Lord. Do not grieve, for the joy of the LORD 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
Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.'The last trumpet': definite article, no explanation given in the text.
For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will be the first to rise.A shout, an archangel's voice, and the trump of God: three sounds, one clause.
And in that day a great ram’s horn will sound, and those who were perishing in Assyria will come forth with those who were exiles in Egypt. And they will worship the LORD on the holy mountain in Jerusalem.A different job: not resurrection, but the regathering of the scattered to Jerusalem.
And He will send out His angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather His elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens 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.
Notable art
— click a piece to enlargeKeep studying
On this page
Doctrines7
- The Fall Feasts: the umbrella this feast opens
- The Hebrew Feasts: the whole calendar, all seven
- The Day of Atonement: ten days later, the fast that follows the blast
- The Rapture: the four timings, argued in full
- The Jubilee: the one trumpet in Scripture that cancels debts
- The Feast of Tabernacles