Elul, and the year 5787

Four verses whose initials spell the month, a year number worked plainly, and the horn the Torah never mentions.

Elul 5786 began on Friday the fourteenth of August 2026 and runs twenty-nine days. At its end, on Saturday the twelfth of September, comes the first of Tishrei and the year 5787. This is the month the calendar gives to whoever wants to arrive at that morning having thought about it, and it has accumulated more numerology than almost any other stretch of the year. Some of it is beautiful. Some of it does not survive contact with a concordance. Both are worth going through.

The month, and how rarely it is named

אלול is a Babylonian month name, taken up with the rest of them after the exile, and its value is small and unremarkable: אלול=67.

The name stands in the twenty-four books exactly 1 time, and even there it is carrying a prefixed lamed rather than standing bare. Bare, the spelling occurs 0 times. Here is its one appearance.

The wall of Jerusalem finished on the twenty-fifth of Elul, in fifty-two days. That is the whole of the month’s biblical career. Everything else attached to Elul, and there is a great deal, comes from the rabbis and from later custom, which is not a criticism. It is simply where the material is from, and a site that computes values ought to be the first to say so.

The Mishnah does give the month a quiet distinction. Four days in the year are heads of a year, it says, and the first of Elul is one of them: the new year for the tithe of cattle. A herdsman’s reckoning day. Rabbi Elazar and Rabbi Shimon put it on the first of Tishrei instead, and the dispute is about accounting rather than about atonement.

Four verses whose initials spell it

The famous one first. Take the opening four words of a verse in Shir HaShirim and read their initials in order.

Alef, lamed, vav, lamed. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine, and the first letters are the name of the month. It is quoted every year and it deserves to be, because the fit between the sense and the season is exact: a month of turning towards, in a book of turning towards.

Note what kind of move this is, though. It is notarikon, not gematria. Nothing has been added up. The initials are being read as a word, which is the second of the three tools the Baal HaTurim works with and a different operation altogether from weighing a word’s value. The only number anywhere near it is the one the four letters make when you do add them, and since the four letters are the month’s own name, that number is just 67 again.

Three more verses are read the same way in the collections that come round every Elul, and this is where an article on a site with a complete index can do something an article elsewhere cannot: all three are below, from our own text, with the four words marked so the initials can be seen rather than asserted.

A man to his fellow, and gifts to the poor. Elul read as the month of giving.

Your heart and the heart of your seed. Elul read as the month of the circumcised heart, and the verse is from the passage the Torah itself calls teshuvah.

And the hardest of the four, from the law of the man who kills without intent: God caused it to come to his hand, and I will appoint you a place. Elul read as the month of refuge, which is a bleaker and better reading than the other three, and which happens to point straight at the cities of refuge in this week’s portion.

Who first read them this way is a question this site cannot answer honestly, and the four are not equal in this respect. The Shir HaShirim one is the one with a pedigree, commonly credited to the Abudarham. The other three are repeated far more often than they are sourced, and the works they are pointed at are not in our library either. So no address is offered for any of the four, and nothing above should be read as a claim about how old they are. What can be shown is what is shown: the verses are ours, the letters are in the order the marking claims, and the reader can check every one of them without leaving the page.

The number of the year

The year that begins in September is 5787, and it is written תשפז, with a gershayim, the double stroke, before the last letter. Worked out it is plain. Tav is 400, shin is 300, peh is 80 and zayin is 7, which is תשפז=787.

Seven hundred and eighty-seven, not five thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven. The five thousands are dropped, and the convention has a name: writing a Hebrew year without its millennium is doing it lifrat katan, by the small reckoning, as against lifrat gadol, which spells the thousands out with a heh in front. Worth saying plainly, since this site also computes a mispar katan and a mispar gadol that have nothing whatever to do with it. One pair of terms is about how a date is abbreviated; the other is about which values the letters are given. They share two adjectives and nothing else.

The year now ending is תשפו=786, one letter and one unit away. There is no significance in the sequence and it would be a small dishonesty to manufacture some. What the number is good for is the same thing every number on this site is good for: it is a key into the index, and 787 opens a door like any other value.

The horn the Torah does not mention

Rosh Hashanah in the Torah is a day of blowing, and it is worth reading the verse that establishes it with some attention to what is not in it.

A day of teruah. No shofar. The word does not appear in either passage about the first of the seventh month, and the Rambam says so at the head of his laws of shofar in as many words: blowing with a shofar is not stated explicitly about Rosh Hashanah. It is learned from the Jubilee.

Just as the teruah of the Jubilee is with a shofar, so the teruah of Rosh Hashanah is with a shofar, learned by tradition. That is the derivation, and it is a good example of a law everybody assumes is written plainly in the Torah standing on an inference from another chapter.

The word itself is spelled both ways in Tanakh. Full, with the vav, שופר stands 23 times and comes to שופר=586. Defective, שפר stands 8 times and comes to שפר=580. Six apart, again, and the six is again the vav.

Only three of those eight are the horn. The rest are a mountain in Bemidbar, a word for fine speech in Bereshit, and an Aramaic verb in Daniel meaning that a thing seemed good. So anyone quoting a value for the shofar should say which spelling they mean, and then whether the occurrences they are counting are shofars at all. Almost nobody does either.

The Mishnah disagrees with itself pleasantly about what the horn should come from. The shofar of Rosh Hashanah is an ibex horn and straight, says one mishnah in Rosh Hashanah, with the mouth plated in gold and two trumpets at its sides. Rabbi Yehudah says the opposite a few lines later: rams’ horns on Rosh Hashanah, ibex horns for the Jubilee. The Rambam rules with Rabbi Yehudah for Rosh Hashanah and adds the shape: a bent ram’s horn, and all other horns are unfit. He goes further than Rabbi Yehudah does, since he gives the Jubilee the same ram’s horn.

The counting is in the Mishnah too, and it is counting in threes. The order of blasts is three, of three each. A tekiah lasts as long as three teruot; a teruah lasts as long as three sobs. Every quantity in the mitzvah is measured against another sound rather than against a clock, which is the sort of detail worth knowing before someone tells you the hundred blasts are a gematria of something.

5787 begins on Shabbat

One fact about this particular year that the calendar settles and that changes what the month is preparing for. The first of Tishrei 5787 falls on a Saturday. The shofar is not sounded on Shabbat, and the Mishnah is explicit about how old that situation is: when the festival of Rosh Hashanah fell on Shabbat they would blow in the Temple but not in the provinces, and after the destruction Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai ordained that they blow in every place that has a court. That ordinance is not acted on today. The practice everywhere is that a first day falling on Shabbat is a day without the sound.

So in 5787 the shofar is heard on the second day and not the first. That is worth knowing four weeks out rather than four minutes out. And note where the ordinance lands: the sound is tied to the presence of a beit din, which is the institution this week’s portion spends five chapters constructing.

Teshuvah, which is not a biblical noun

The last honest correction, and it is a surprising one. תשובה comes to תשובה=713, and that value gets quoted a good deal. The word itself, spelled exactly so, stands in the twenty-four books 0 times.

Not once. The noun as we use it, repentance, is rabbinic. What the Tanakh has is the verb, and it has it constantly, and the imperative form of it opens the haftarah that is read on the Shabbat between the new year and the fast.

Return, Israel. Not a state to be attained but a direction to be walked in, which is what the root means and what the later noun was built out of. A gematria offered for תשובה is a gematria of a spelling Scripture never sets down. The noun itself does stand in Tanakh in other forms, and where it does it means the turn of the year or an answer given, never repentance. That does not make the number worthless, but it does make it a comment on rabbinic Hebrew rather than on Scripture. Saying which is which costs a sentence.

The Rambam, who is in our library and whose laws of repentance run ten chapters, gives the month its best sentence without a number in it anywhere. The blast of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is a decree of Scripture, he writes, and there is a hint in it: wake up, sleepers, from your sleep, and search your deeds, and return. He adds elsewhere that while teshuvah and crying out are good all year, in the ten days between the new year and the Day of Atonement they are better and are received at once.

Elul is the run-up to those ten days, and nothing in this article makes it so. The arithmetic here is small: 67, 787, 586, 713. The month is not those numbers. It is the four weeks before the morning they are counted on, and what to do with the four weeks is not a question the index can answer. On what gematria can and cannot be asked to carry, see what gematria is, and what it is not.