Rosh Hashanah Miscellania

There are five common names for Rosh Hashanah:

• Yom ha-Zichron (Day of Remembrance)
• Yom Teruah (Day of Shouting/Blowing Trumpets)
• Yom ha-Din (Day of Judgment)
• Rosh ha-Shana (Head of the Year)
• Feast of Trumpets

Teruah means shouting, noise-making, or trumpet blowing.

This is a partial (I'm sure) list of scriptures related to Rosh Hashana:

• Genesis 1:1-5
• Genesis 22:1-18
• Leviticus 23:23-25
• A day of solemn rest
• A memorial of trumpets/shouting
• A holy convocation
• No ordinary work
• Present a burnt offering to YHVH
• Leviticus 25
• Year of Jubilee begins in the 7th month on Yom Kippur
• Yom Teruah is preparation for the beginning of the Jubilee
• Numbers 10:5
• Teruah used for the sound of trumpets as a signal to break camp and move out. “Noise of Teruah”
• Numbers 23:21
• Balaam: “YHVH is with Israel & the shout/trumpet of a king is among them.
• Numbers 29:1-6
• 1st day of the 7th month
• A holy convocation
• No ordinary work
• A day of trumpets/shouting
• A burnt offering
• 1 bull
• 1 ram
• 7 male yearling lambs
• Grain offering with oil
• 3/10 ephah for the bull
• 2/10 ephah for the ram
• 1/10 ephah for each of the 7 lambs
• 1 male goat for a sin offering/atonement
• New moon offering with grain
• Regular (daily?) burnt offering with grain and drink offering
• Numbers 31:6
• Teruah as the sound of the silver trumpets when going into war
• Joshua 6
• 1 Samuel 4:5-6
• 2 Samuel 6:15
• 1 Chronicles 15:28 
• 2 Chronicles 15:14
• Ezra 3:11-13
• Psalm 47:5
• Psalm 89:15
• Job 8:21
• Job 33:26
• Job 39:25
• Jeremiah 20:16
• Ezekiel 21:22
• Ezekiel 40:1
• Amos 1:14
• Malachi 3:16-18
• Matthew 24:29-51
• 1 Corinthians 15:51-57
• 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17
• Revelation 10:5-7
• Revelation 11:14-18
• Revelation 20:12-15

Teruah (or Trumpets in the NT) in Scripture

Some of these are based on my assumptions and could be incorrect. Some are certainly missing some instances.

• Assembly
• Numbers 10:2-4
• Joel 2:15
• Matthew 24:31
• Victory cry
• Jeremiah 20:16
• Ezekiel 21:22
• 1 Corinthians 15:51-57
• 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17
• Revelation 11:15-17
• Arrival of a king
• Numbers 23:21
• 2 Samuel 15:10
• 1 Kings 1:33-40
• Psalm 47:5
• Joel 2:1
• Matthew 24:29-51
• 1 Corinthians 15:51-57
• 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17
• Revelation 10:7
• Revelation 11:15-17
• Arrival of the Ark of the Covenant
• 1 Samuel 4:5-6
• 1 Chronicles 15:28
• Battle signals
• Numbers 10:9
• Numbers 31:6
• Joshua 6
• 2 Samuel 2:28
• 2 Samuel 18:16
• Job 39:25
• Jeremiah 4:21
• Jeremiah 20:16
• Ezekiel 21:22
• Amos 1:14
• Amos 2:2
• Zephaniah 1:14-16
• Zechariah 9:14
• 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17
• Revelation 11:15-17
• Yom Teruah
• Leviticus 23:23-25
• Numbers 29:1-6
• Jubilee (50th Yom Kippur)
• Leviticus 25:8-22
• Joel 2:15
• Repentance
• 2 Chronicles 15:14
• Joel 2:12-17
• Call to move
• Numbers 10:5
• Resurrection
• 1 Corinthians 15:51-57
• 1 Thessalonians 4:13-17
• Shouts of Joy
• Leviticus 23:23-25
• Leviticus 25
• Numbers 23:21
• Numbers 29:1-6
• Ezra 3:11-13
• Job 8:21
• Job 33:26
• Voice of God
• Exodus 19:16-19
• Exodus 20:18-19
• Numbers 23:21
• Psalm 47:5
• Psalm 89:15
• Warning of danger
• Jeremiah 6:1
• Ezekiel 33:1-9
• Joel 2:1
• Amos 3:6
• Worship
• Leviticus 23:23-25
• Numbers 10:10
• Numbers 29:1-6
• Joshua 6
• 2 Samuel 6:15
• 1 Chronicles 16:42
• Ezra 3:11-13
• Job 8:21
• Job 33:26
• Psalm 98:4-6

The term "Rosh Hashanah" is not used in Scripture, but that doesn't make it wrong. "September 19" isn't in Scripture anywhere either, but there's nothing wrong with calling the 19th day of the month of September "September 19".

Rosh Hashanah is called a New Year's Day. Although God said that the month of Passover is to be the "first of months", there is no command in Torah to call any day "New Years" nor is there any command not to call any day "New Years".

A "year" is one orbit of the earth around the sun. It's roughly a circle and circles don't have beginnings or ends. There is no "first day" in the earth's orbit. In a sense, every single day is the start of another orbit. Every anniversary, every feast day is the start of a new year in the sense that we begin counting the days until this same event comes around again next year.

Every calendar in every culture has multiple calendar years and "New Year's Days". We have tax years, fiscal years, school years, agricultural cycles, etc. The Biblical calendar is no different. There is a year for trees and a year for planting barley and a year for setting slaves free and returning to ancestral inheritances.

Yom Teruah/Rosh Hashanah is the first day of the Fall Feasts. It is the traditional date of the creation of Adam and of the Day of Judgment. It is the beginning of a period of repentance and reflection leading up to the Day of Atonement, known in Hebrew as Yom Kippur. On Yom Teruah our sins are judged and we are warned by the voice of the shofarim to repent and appeal to God's mercy. On Yom Kippur, depending on our faith and state of penitence, our sins are atoned and we are set free or else we are condemned. 

Like it or not, there is an annual cycle in Scripture that begins and ends at Yom Teruah. I don't particularly care what the ancient Babylonians did or didn't do. 

If that's not enough for you, I hope you can still see that "Rosh Hashanah" is just a label for a day, not the day itself. The term "Day of Trumpets" isn't in Torah because Torah was written in Hebrew, not English. If you reject the term "Rosh Hashanah" because it's not found in God's original instructions, you must also reject "Feast of Trumpets", "September 19", and all other English labels, because they aren't there either. Call it "Apples and Honey" day or "First of Seventh" (1st day of the 7th Hebrew month) if you want. Changing the label for the day doesn't change the day.

Don't get bent out of shape over mere words. Focus on the substance, not semantics.

Antinomianism Is Biblical Nonsense

For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell."
(Acts 15:28-29 ESV)

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
(1 Corinthians 6:9-10 ESV)

Those who say that Acts 15 (among other passages) means God's commands about what animals we should and shouldn't eat no longer apply need to explain the enormous contradiction between these two passages. Of course, the only way to explain this apparent contradiction scripturally is to conclude that the apostles did not throw out all of God's commandments about what is appropriate to eat.

God has always cared what we eat. From Eden to Revelation, even in Acts 15, the stuff we put in our mouths has been at the very center of obedience to God's commands.

Sacred Namers

Can anyone point me to a single verse anywhere in the Bible in which God tells us how to pronounce the tetragrammaton? Just one. No? Then get over yourselves. If it were that important, He would have given us some hint as to where the vowels and stress are supposed to go.

The ungodly obsession that some people have over getting the pronunciation right is indeed ungodly. It comes from a spirit of pride and gnosticism, a spiritual addiction to false mystery. It's not even really His name! It's just a label designed to teach us things about Him and you do not need to know how to pronounce it correctly to learn the lessons. I don't care if you say Yahuah, Yahweh, Jehovah, Yehovah, Yahwah, or whatever your current favorite is. It's still yod-heh-vav-heh,

When you, who barely knows any Hebrew at all, tell people that you know more than all of the greatest Hebrew scholars of the last 2000 years, when you tell them that the exact pronunciation is more important than whether or not they're feeding the poor or keeping the Sabbath, know that you have strayed way off the path and become nothing but a tool for Satan to divide God's people. You are making God's people weak and ridiculous.

Spheres of the Kingdom

As I read the prophets, I am getting a picture of a Millennial Kingdom in which the world is organized into spheres with Messiah at the center.

Sphere 1: Messiah Yeshua
Sphere 2: Kohanim
Sphere 3: Levites
Sphere 4: Natural Israel
Sphere 5: Naturalized Israel (The Mixed Multitude)
Sphere 6: Believing Nations
Sphere 7: Unbelieving Nations

Remember that Paul's statement about Jew & Gentile, male & female, slave & free, was made only in the context of salvation. It was never meant to be applied more broadly than that.

This scheme of spheres in the Kingdom of God probably is not 100% accurate, especially in Spheres 4-6, but I suspect it's in the neighborhood.

Peace with Islam

There are two ways to live at peace with Islam:

1. Keep it far away and don't mess with it. Like a hornets nest.
2. Turn Muslims into disciples of Yeshua. It's going to happen for many of them someday anyway (Isaiah 60:6-7) and there's no better time than now.

What you can't do is invite them to live among you as Muslims and tell yourself that America (or Germany, etc.) will be different than India, Sudan, Afghanistan, and everywhere else that Islam has colonized. That's not living at peace with your neighbor. It's not "loving". It's just national suicide.

Declare God's Faithfulness

A parallelism in Deuteronomy 26:3-10 instructs us to declare God's faithfulness in fulfilling the promises He made to our fathers.

Deuteronomy 26:3-4	Deuteronomy 26:5-10
Declare to YHWH the priest’s God	Speak before YHWH your God
I have come into the land	Our father went to the land of Egypt
YHWH swore to give to our fathers	YHWH brought us back to this land
Priest shall take the basket	Now I bring the firstfruit of the ground
Set it before the altar of YHWH	Set it down before YHWH

A couple observations...

• The petitioner is to say "A wandering Aramean was my father". (See v5.) This is usually assumed to be Abraham, but that doesn't fit all of the details of that verse. Abraham and Jacob are actually combined into a single character, just as Israel is an amalgamation of the natural children of Jacob and the believers who have been grafted in from among the nations. They became a great nation in Egypt together and they left Egypt together.
• The petitioner isn't to tell the story in chronological order. Instead, he is to begin his offering by declaring that he has taken possession of the land that God promised to the patriarchs, and only then tell of how his ancestors were oppressed in Egypt. Then he is to state again God has brought Israel into the Promised Land. This is a chiasm embedded within the offering.
• I have come into the land
• God swore to give this land to our fathers
• The Firstfruits offering
• Our fathers didn't see the fulfillment of the promise, but went to Egypt instead
• God brought us into the Promised Land

Oppressing the Oppresser

This parallelism in Joel 3:19-21 illustrates the principle at work in Deuteronomy 19:19, which says regarding a false accuser, "You shall do to him as he had meant to do to his brother. So you shall purge the evil from your midst."

Egypt and Edom attacked Judah and Jerusalem without cause, but God turned their violence back on them and multiplied it.

Egypt and Edom	Judah and Jerusalem
V19 – Egypt shall become a desolation	V20 – Judah shall be inhabited forever
…and Edom a desolate wilderness	…and Jerusalem to all generations
…for violence done to Judah	V21 – I will avenge their blood
…because they shed innocent blood	…because YHWH dwells in Zion

Lest Egypt's punishment seem overly harsh, remember who created whom. Who is the potter and who is the clay?