The year 5688 תרפ״ח
5688 in the Jewish calendar is written ה׳תרפ״ח — the ה is the 5,000 years, and the letters after it are the 688 since. Written on its own, as it is on nearly every page that carries a date, the year is תרפ״ח, and those letters add to 688.
The letters, and what each is worth
400 + 200 + 80 + 8 = 688, computed by the same engine that computes every value on this site, over the same consonantal letters.
Why the five thousand is missing
The full form is ה׳תרפ״ח: the first letter carries the 5,000. In ordinary use it is left off and the year is written תרפ״ח followed by לפ״ק — lifrat katan, “by the minor reckoning”, which is the writer saying out loud that the thousands have been dropped. It is a habit of writing and not a claim about the number: the year is 5,688, and 688 is what its letters spell.
What the letters spell
No word of the twenty-four books is written תרפח, though the same letters rearranged do spell words the text uses. The year’s letters are a numeral here, not a word, and this page will not make one out of them.
688 in the Tanakh
69 words and 868 phrases carry the value 688 under the standard method — 937 matches in all.
The letters of a Jewish year are a numeral, and this page treats them as one. Every value here is the engine’s, computed on the consonantal letters at the moment the page is served, and every count is read from the Westminster Leningrad Codex. Nothing on this page is a prediction.