The Seven Trumpets of Jericho, James Tissot c. 1896-1902. The Jewish Museum
Rosh Hashanah: The Original Meaning of Blowing a Teruah
Rosh Hashanah in the Torah is described as a day of teruah, a reference to one of the two types of blasts: a regular horn blast (tekiah) and a teruah blast. Interpreters ancient and modern understand the distinction as differing in sound, length, or pitch, but the biblical description of the shofar blowing during the siege of Jericho implies that the nature of a teruah lies in the people’s response to the blast.
Published: September 18, 2022
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Last Updated: October 28, 2026
See discussion in HALOT (The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament), s.v. תרועה, which suggests that alarm was likely the older, more primary meaning.
See discussion in Shawn Joe Lichaa, “A Shofar-less Rosh Hashanah: A Karaite’s Experience of Yom Teruah,” TheTorah (2014).
The text is missing any reference to the movement of the other parts of the camp. For a discussion of this problem, see Zev Farber, “How Many Trumpet Blasts to Travel? MT+SP=LXX,” TheTorah (2022).
Notably this verse does not appear in the zichronot section of the Rosh Hashanah musaf, despite its stark similarities. Perhaps, given that this verse refers to silver trumpets and not the animal-horn shofar, the rabbis preferred not to include it.
Baruch A. Levine (Numbers 1–20, Anchor Bible [New York: Doubleday, 1993], 305) offers an inverse interpretation, that tekiah is a short blast and teruah is a prolonged one.
This reading follows the Kaufmann MS.
Rabbinic interpretation assumes that all blasts should be made with a shofar and not a (silver) trumpet, and that on Rosh Hashanah, tekiah blasts should accompany teruah blasts. It is not clear from the verses how they derive this. For some discussion on the development of Rosh Hashanah in pre-rabbinic times, see Zev Farber and Marc Zvi Brettler, “Rosh Hashanah Between Tanach and Mishna,” TheTorah (2014).
See discussion in volume 4 of R. Joseph Kapih’s commentary on Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, Sefer Zemanim, “Laws of Shofar, Sukkah, and Lulav” 3:2, pp. 479–481.
Many sociologists have noted how sports in contemporary Western society has in many ways taken the place of religion. See, for example, ch. 3 in Gary Laderman, Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, The Living Dead and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States (New York: New Press, 2009), 43–62.
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields Oxford Worlds Classics (Free Press, 1995), trans. of Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (1912).
Editor’s note: For some discussion, see Marc Zvi Brettler, “God’s Coronation on Rosh Hashanah,” TheTorah (2014); Israel Knohl, “Rosh Hashanah: Why the Torah Suppresses God's Kingship,” TheTorah (2018).
It is unclear why the rabbis preferred to interpret the term as a reference just a specific type of horn blast, and ignored the simple implication that it included the shout of the crowd. Perhaps there was a concern, especially during periods of foreign rule, that such a ritual could “get out of hand” and the shouts would lead to a high level of emotion that could get people riled up, especially given the association of the teruah in Numbers 10 with gathering for military purposes.
That said, in many congregations, people do sing out loud hayom harat olam and areset sefateinu after each of the shofar-blast series during musaf, which may be a way of expressing the collective-effervescence response to the horn blasts that were once part of the ritual.
