Rosh Hashanah, and the name the Torah never gives it

A day of teruah, a memorial of blasting, the one verse in the twenty-four books that says Rosh Hashanah, and the number 861 checked as honestly as it can be.

Rosh Hashanah arrives at the head of Tishrei carrying more names than any other day of the year. The greetings call it the new year. The machzor calls it the day of judgment. The Torah, read closely, calls it neither, and the phrase everyone knows it by stands in the twenty-four books exactly once, dated to a different day of the month. None of that diminishes the day. It does mean that anyone who wants to know what Scripture actually says about the first of the seventh month is in for some surprises, and a site whose whole business is checking words against an index is a reasonable place to go through them.

Two names, and neither is a new year

The Torah legislates the day twice, once in Vayikra and once in Bemidbar, and the two passages give it two names between them.

A day of teruah. The word means a blast, a broken cry, the sound the day is commanded to be full of, and the phrase יום תרועה stands in the twenty-four books exactly once, here. The word itself, as a spelling, stands 15 times, and comes to תרועה=681.

A memorial of teruah, this time with a shabbaton attached, and זכרון תרועה is also a phrase the Tanakh writes exactly once. Two passages, two names, one day, and in neither of them a word about a year beginning or ending. The Torah counts its months from the spring, and the day these verses establish is the first of the seventh month, no more the head of a year than the first of any other month is. Whether the sound must come from a shofar is its own question, and the answer is learned from the Jubilee rather than from either of these verses, which is worked through in the article about Elul.

The one verse that says Rosh Hashanah

The phrase itself, ראש השנה, head of the year, does occur in the Tanakh. Once, and never bare: the one place it stands, it stands under a prefixed bet. Not in the Torah, and not about this day.

Yechezkel dates his last great vision to Rosh Hashanah and then, in the same breath, to the tenth of the month, which the first of Tishrei never is. The classical readers took the two datings together and understood a Jubilee year, in which the tenth of Tishrei, Yom Kippur itself, is the day the horn goes out and liberty is proclaimed. That discussion lives in the Talmud’s tractate on this festival, which is not in this site’s library, so no page of it is cited here. The plain fact on the surface of the verse needs no tractate: the only time the twenty-four books say Rosh Hashanah, they mean a day other than the one we call by that name.

The month the written Tanakh never names

The day’s month has the same story as its name. תשרי is, like Elul, a Babylonian month name that came back from the exile with the community that had been there, and the spelling stands in the twenty-four books 0 times. Elul at least manages one appearance, in Nechemiah, and even there under a prefix. Tishrei has neither. The Torah’s own name for it is simply the seventh month, as both verses above say, and the month’s value, for whoever wants it, is תשרי=910.

An index that could only say yes would not be worth much. Part of the point of a complete concordance is that its zeros are real: when it says a spelling is not in the written Tanakh, the word is rabbinic, and saying so costs a sentence. The month’s name is rabbinic Hebrew. So is teshuvah as a noun. So, it turns out, is the festival’s.

Where the name Rosh Hashanah does live is the Mishnah, whose tractate for this festival opens by counting four heads of years, and gives this day the largest portfolio: the first of Tishrei is the new year for years, for shemittah cycles and for Jubilees, for planting and for vegetables. For years is the reason the year number turns over on this day even though the months are counted from Nisan, and the year number itself, with its small reckoning, is worked plainly in the Elul article.

The judgment the Mishnah states

The judgment is not in the Torah’s two passages either, and it does not need to be read into them here, because the Mishnah states it as plainly as anything in the seder is stated: at four seasons the world is judged, and on Rosh Hashanah all who come into the world pass before Him like sheep. The famous single-file image belongs to the commentators on a phrase with more than one classical reading, so the sentence here keeps to the Mishnah’s own words. The mishnah quotes its verse, and the verse is ours to show.

The One who fashions all their hearts is the One who considers all their doings. The Rambam carries the image into law without softening it: just as a person’s merits and sins are weighed at the hour of death, so every year, on the festival of Rosh Hashanah, the deeds of everyone alive are weighed. Whoever is found righteous is sealed for life, whoever is found wicked is sealed for death, and the person in between is held over until Yom Kippur: if he has repented by then he is sealed for life, and if not, for death. The Ten Days of Repentance are that suspension, written as one sentence of law.

The liturgy the Mishnah prescribes for the day does its own counting, and it counts in tens: no fewer than ten verses of kingship, ten of remembrance, ten of the horn, beginning in the Torah and concluding in the Prophets, and none of them a verse of punishment. That is counting, not gematria, the same distinction the Chanukah lights taught, and it is the day’s own answer to what its themes are: kingship, memory, and the sound.

The horn, the moon and the statute

One psalm stands closer to the day than any other, and two of its verses do a great deal of work.

Blow the horn at the new moon. Of the appointed days the Torah lists, this is the only one set on the first of a month, and the verse’s second half has been read two ways for a very long time: the translation printed above hears in it the full moon of a feast, and the classical reading hears the covered moon, the one festival that falls while the moon is still hidden. That reading is carried in the same tractate this page has already declined to cite, so it is named and left. The psalm’s next verse says what kind of day the horn announces.

A statute for Israel, and a mishpat, a judgment, for the God of Yaakov. The horn and the verdict stand in two consecutive verses of one psalm, which is the whole day in miniature. What the horn is worth, in both of its biblical spellings, is already worked in the Elul article, and there is no need to say it twice.

What is read on the day

The Mishnah in Megillah assigns the day its Torah reading, and its choice is the Vayikra passage quoted at the top of this page, which it marks as such: on Rosh Hashanah they read In the seventh month, on the first of the month. The reading a synagogue hears today is a later arrangement, recorded in the Gemara of that tractate on a daf this site’s cache does not hold, so it is described here and given no page number: the festival keeps two days, and each day is given a story.

The first day reads the birth of Yitzchak, and the reading’s first verse turns on the marked word: Sarah is remembered. The tradition that ties her remembering to this day in particular is Talmudic, from the tractate on the festival, and it is named here without an address for the same reason as before. The choice of reading argues for itself in any case. On the day of the memorial of teruah, the Torah reading is about being remembered.

The second day reads the binding of Yitzchak, which turns on a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. Why the day’s horn is a ram’s horn rather than any other animal’s is answered in the same uncited tractate, with this ram as the answer. Some of the day’s furniture can be opened from the shelf this site holds, and some of it, honestly, cannot; the rule of this section is that the difference is always said out loud.

Eat the fat and drink the sweet

Once in the twenty-four books, the day is actually kept, and the chapter that keeps it dates itself.

Ezra reads the Torah to the whole assembly from first light until midday. The people weep at what they hear, and Nechemiah and Ezra stop them, because the day is holy and not for mourning. Then comes the instruction that has outlived every empire in the chapter.

Eat the fat and drink the sweet, and send portions to whoever has nothing prepared. Nobody in the chapter sounds a horn, and nobody says Rosh Hashanah; it is the first day of the seventh month, kept with Torah, food, and care for the people who have none. The sweet things on the table at every Rosh Hashanah meal since have no verse commanding them, but they have this one standing behind them, which is more than most customs can say for themselves.

861, checked honestly

The number most often quoted for the day is the value of its rabbinic name. ראש=501 and השנה=360, so ראש השנה=861. The observation that comes round every year sets that sum beside another phrase: בית המקדש=861. The arithmetic checks. Our engine recomputes both sums, and they are equal. Who first noticed it is a question this page leaves open, because the works the equation is usually credited to are outside this site’s library, and a plausible attribution is worse than none.

There is a quieter fact underneath it, and the index is the only witness it needs. Neither phrase is in the Tanakh. ראש השנה never stands bare in the twenty-four books; its one appearance carries a prefixed bet and, as we saw, belongs to the tenth of the month. בית המקדש stands zero times. The nearest the text comes is a pair of near misses in Divrei HaYamim: David charging Shlomo to build a house for the sanctuary, and, at the other end of the story, the house of their sanctuary in the verse that watches it burn. The famous equation is arithmetic between two pieces of rabbinic Hebrew. Both phrases are real, both sums are right, and what the equality proves is a question for the article on what gematria can and cannot carry.

Behind the number door below stand 903 spans of the twenty-four books, in canonical order from the first of them, and not one is the day’s name. That is the honest state of a small number in a compact language, and it is worth seeing with your own eyes.

The day, as the sources this site holds give it: a teruah the Torah commands and does not explain, a remembering, a judgment the Mishnah states and the Rambam writes into law, ten verses of kingship and ten of memory and ten of the horn, and one morning in Nechemiah when keeping the day rightly turned out to mean Torah, food, and sending portions. The numbers on this page are small furniture beside all that. They are keys into an index, and the doors above are open.