Is Yom Teruah Rosh Hashanah?

Is Yom Teruah Rosh Hashanah?

Sept. 10, 2018: What about it?

Once again, I hear my ignorant brethren loudly proclaiming that Yom Teruah is not the beginning of the year in those broad declarations that mean it cannot be the beginning of any year. Is this the whole truth? Or is there some error in this declaration?

It is true that the first day of the seventh month is not specifically called “Rosh Hashanah” in Scripture. In fact, we call the day “Yom Teruah.” This is its biblical name. It means “day of blowing” “shouting.” The purpose of the noise can be to announce and proclaim an event. We now know what that event is. It is Messiah’s birth.

But “Rosh Hashanah” is found in Scripture! Specifically it is found in Ezekiel 40:1: “In the 25th year of our captivity, in Rosh Hashanah, in the 10th day of the month, in the 14th year after the city was smitten, in this same day, the hand of Yahweh was upon me. Then he brings me there.”

The words “Rosh Ha-shanah” mean in Hebrew “head of the year,” or “beginning of the year.” So the literal sense is, “In the 25th year of our captivity, in the beginning of the year....” It would appear to be that he is speaking of the beginning of the 25th year in some sense. (See Figure 1).

Now you will have to bear with me for a side trip, because it is important to this text and its ultimate meaning. According to Jewish tradition, Ezekiel 40:1 is referring to the year of Jubilee. The reasoning goes like this: The Jubilee trumpet was blown on the 10th day of the 7th month. So the Jewish tradition takes the mention of the 10th day along with the words “Rosh Hashanah” to refer to the start of the year of Jubilee. There are two problems with this tradition. The first is that there is no text that specifically says the Jubilee year begins on Yom Kippur. It is certainly declared holy then though, “And you will have declared to be holy the fiftieth year” (Lev. 25:10). But its sabbatical character must begin when other sabbatical years do, which is on the new moon of the seventh month.

Now I have to take you deep into Hebrew to show that something can be declared to have a holy character after the holiness begins. That is, the moment of declaring something holy can occur after it is already holy. If we go over to Genesis 2:2 we see that the KJV says, “And on the seventh day God ended his work.....” This translation has caused a headache for translators and interpreters. It appears to be that God was working up to some point on the seventh day, and then he ended his work on it. Therefore we have a host of translations that translate, “By the seventh day....” You can see that about 1/3 of the translations do this here.

Not only that, but certain ancient versions, the Samaritan, and the Old Greek “solve” the problem by changing the text to “the sixth day!” To say the least, neither changing the text to 6th day or translating the preposition “By” are a legitimate way of translating the Hebrew. The reason all three renditions are wrong is that the translators have lost the sense of the Hebrew. And as we will see, this is important for Lev. 25:8-10, Gen. 2:2-3, and our Ezekiel passage.

Now I have to get technical for the sake of high level scholars, but I’ll make the point plain in a bit. The verb form in these two cases is Piel. I describe the Piel as a causative emphatic passive infix. The middle root letter is doubled. The middle position is the causative position (like Hiphil adds a vowel under or after the middle root letter). The doubling, like the Niphal in the first root letter, is a passive infix. A passive sense, however, is also an added waw between the second and third root letters.

The literal sense of the Piel is “made to be;” Hence “made to be finished,” “made to be holy.” You can substitute “caused” or “made:” ”caused to be.” One of the nuances of the Piel is to delcare something to be so. The key is that it can be declared to be so after it already is so. The declaration is just formalizing it. So back in Gen. 2:2, “On the seventh day he declared to be finished his work.” And in Gen. 2:3, on the seventh day, “Then he declared it to be holy.” So when did he finish his work? At the end of the sixth day. When did he begin to rest? Just as the sixth day ended. When did he declare his work finished? On the seventh day. We are to behold his creation work on the seventh day. It is a memorial of creation. We take note of creation on the seventh day. It is all finished.

A beautiful example of declarative Piel is found in Lev. 13:13, “And he will have declared to be unclean the plague” (or the person with it). Surely the person with the disease is already unclean. So when the texts use the Piel, they mean “declared to be.” The declarative Piel is a recognized nuance by Hebrew scholars so I will not elaborate further.

So now we can return to Lev. 25:10, “And ye will have declared to be holy the 50th year....” This case does not mean the beginning of the Jubilee is on Yom Kippur. It only means it is declared holy then. It is a like case of the Sabbath being “declared to be holy” on the Sabbath, well after it has begun, just as his work was “declared to be finished” well after it was done.

Now you can imagine why scholars, who know about the declarative Piel, do not actually apply it to Genesis 2:2-3. To do so is to confess that Sabbath is a creation institution! Declared to be holy. Now we are to treat it as holy by resting on it.

So the first point is proved. Something can be declared to be holy after it is already holy, like the Shabbat. Likewise the Jubilee. Like other Shabbat years, it must begin on Yom Teruah. So the Jewish tradition is wrong on the point that they have proved the Jubilee to begin on Yom Kippur. It is only declared holy then. It does not begin then.

The second point that the Jewish tradition is incorrect about, and here I mean Seder Olam, is the claim in the first place that the 25th year in Ezekiel 40:1 was a Jubilee. I will not disprove that here. It is disproved in the book you see featured here. This article is an application and I am going to stay on the theme of discussing “Rosh Hashanah.” That year was not a Jubilee, so the argument attached to this assumption is incorrect. So we have two lines of evidence, witnesses, that the Jewish tradition for Ezekiel 40:1 is incorrect.

What then does “beginning of the year” mean? Well a beginning always has some duration, an hour, a day, a month. What unit of time is the beginning unit? The text does not say. But what I think we are meant to understand is the beginning month. A look at Exodus 12:2 will show good reason for this, “This month for you is the ROSH of the months,” i.e. “it is the first for you of the months of the year.” What we have in Ezekiel 40:1 is a beginning month of the year. But it is not the first. It is the seventh, which begins the years of the agricultural cycle for the purpose of sabbath years.

Now some are going to claim that a year cannot have two beginnings. Well it cannot have two beginnings for the same purpose at different times, but surely the day begins at dawn, and the Shabbat begins at sunset. So there are two beginnings to a “day.” Even in English there are different beginnings to a year for different legal purposes. There is a year dated from creation about 365 days long. But there is also a year that is any length of time about 365 days, such as an anniversary period of some other event. These are two different meanings of “year.”

What I think happens is that people discover that their arguments for certain matters depend on certain scriptural time concepts having one and only one meaning. This allows them to dogmatically reject any alternative interpretation. It is the easy way out. But it is also intellectually dishonest. I have seen time and time again Torah teachers insist that a time concept cannot possibly have another meaning even when the one questioning them has proved it. This is because they have built their houses on certain dogmatic points which are derived from tradition rather than building on a solid foundation.

So now, Ezekiel 40:1 is not a Jubilee, and “Rosh Hashanah” does not refer to a particular day. Probably, it refers to the whole month. I now turn to determining what sort of year the 25th year was. This is because the text says that it is at the beginning of it. However this year is determined will determine if Rosh Hashanah can refer to the 7th month. If it turns out the 25th year started in the spring, then apologists might have an argument that Rosh Hashanah does not refer to the seventh month.

I will give the quick summary here. The 25th year was the 25th year of the 70 year exile. These years were assigned to Judah on the basis of not having kept so many sabbatical years. This is clue No. 1 that the years date from the fall. Clue No. 2 is found in 2 Kings 25:27. (See Figure 2). In the 37th year of the captivity, Jehoiachin was released by the king of Babylon. It was in the 12th month, on the 27th day, and it says “Evilmerodach, king of Babylon, in the year of his reigning the ROSH.” This is a specific phrase “in the year of his reigning” that refers to his accession year. Rosh literally means “head,” so it is the head year. This is like the head day of unleavened bread being the day before the seven days of the feast.

It so happens that that Babylonian chronology supplies us with an exact dating of this event: April 2, 561 BC. But this is not so much the important point as that it was the 12th month AND the 37th year. Accordingly the 37th year began the previous fall. Why cannot the 37th year have begun the previous spring? The simple answer is there are not space in the chronology for 37th years if one does that. Pushing the 37th year back will abolish the first year of the exile completely. (See Figure 3). They only way it can be the 37th year in the month of Adar in 561 BC and the exile to have begin in 597 BC in the spring is for the years to be counted from the fall.

So we see then that the 25th year is computed on a fall basis. Accordinly “Rosh Hashanah” in Ezekiel 40:1 for this year occurs in the fall. Like I said, I think it means the whole 7th month. So we ask the question. Is Yom Teruah also Rosh Hashanah. I say it is not explicitly so, but it is implicitly so. A head month of the year also has to have a beginning day which begins the month that begins the year. So given the precedent that the seventh month begins the 25th year, and it has to be the month, and not the day, because the 10th day does not begin the Jubilee, then that month’s beginning day is also logically the beginning of the year.

That does not mean we have to call it “Rosh Hashanah,” but neither are the Jewish people nor anyone else who calls it that in the wrong. It is only other elements of the tradition in Seder Olam that are incorrect.