This week, we are taking a brief pause from our regular Torah reading portion. This Friday evening and Saturday mark the eve and celebration of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Because of the festival, synagogues around the world set aside the regular weekly reading in Deuteronomy to focus instead on holiday readings.
In the past, I have done an entire series introducing and walking through the biblical feasts, and for those of you who want a foundational primer, I’ll link my previous episode, “Rosh Hashanah for the Goyim,” in the show notes.
But this year, I wanted to take advantage of this natural pause in our reading cycle to do something a little different and talk about the instruments and symbols associated with the Jewish High Holidays. Naturally, I thought we would start with the most unmistakable symbol of them all: the shofar.
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What is a shofar?
When you hear a shofar, you are hearing an instrument unlike any other. It is not made of hammered metal, crafted by human hands and refined through metallurgy, like the silver trumpets described in Numbers 10. Instead, the shofar is organic, taken directly from the natural world—almost always from the curved horn of a kosher ram. The shofar is intentionally unadorned. When air is forced through it, it does not produce a conventional melody; it produces an elemental cry. It’s a sound that is supposed to bypass human intellect and speak directly to the soul.
Mount Sinai
In Exodus 19, the children of Israel arrive in the desert and stand before the trembling mountain. On the morning of the third day, they heard thunder and saw flashes of lightning as a dense cloud enveloped the peak. At the same time, they heard the blast of a shofar so loud that every single person in the camp shook with fear. As Moses spoke and God answered, the sound of the horn did not fade away. Instead, the scripture says the sound grew louder and louder.
This was the acoustic presence of the Living God. It shattered Israel’s complacency, establishing a boundary between the profane and the holy, and announcing that heaven was delivering its eternal moral law into the hands of mortals. Centuries later, the author of Hebrews described the sound of the shofar as something that made the hearers beg that “no further word be spoken to them” (Heb 12:19).
Yet the shofar’s spiritual heartbeat is anchored even earlier in sacred history, in the drama of Genesis 22—the Binding of Isaac.
Abraham and Isaac
When Abraham climbed Mount Moriah out of obedience, and put his son upon the altar, at the final moment, the Angel of the Lord halted his hand. When Abraham looked up, he saw a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. The horns were the feature that entangled the animal, anchoring it in place until Abraham lifted his eyes.
The ram took the place of Isaac upon the altar. The horn therefore represents God’s unexpected grace—the divine principle that God Himself provides the ransom (Adonai Yireh) so that the human life is spared.
The rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud saw this moment as the foundation of the shofar as a ram’s horn. Technically, a shofar can be made from the horn of any kosher animal, but a ram’s horn is by far the most common. Because a ram’s horn points back to the near sacrifice of Isaac and God’s mercy in sparing Abraham from committing the act.
In the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Abbahu explained that the horn is blown on the New Year specifically to evoke this moment:
“The Holy One, Blessed be He, said: ‘Sound a ram’s horn before Me so that I may remember on your behalf the binding of Isaac, the son of Abraham, and I will account it to you as if you bound yourselves before Me.’”
Jericho
In the Bible, the ram’s horn was not just a symbol of God’s mercy, but also his judgment. For forty years, Israel had lived as nomadic wanderers under Moses. After Moses died on Mount Nebo, Joshua assumed command. When he led the camp past the Jordan River and into the promised land, Jericho was their first target. Jericho was an ancient walled oasis fed by a perennial freshwater spring. Anyone crossing the southern Jordan ford had to deal with Jericho; leaving a fortified hostile city at their rear would have cut off their supply lines and retreat route.
God gave an attack plan that defied military wisdom. According to God’s instructions, seven priests, carrying seven shofars, were to march before the Ark of the Covenant around the city once a day for six days. On the seventh day, they marched seven times. And when the priests blew a long, piercing blast and all the people released a mighty shout, the stone walls would collapse flat. Jericho fell not because of battering rams or military prowess, but because the sound of the shofar declared God’s sovereign judgment and rightful ownership over the land.
Jubilee
In Leviticus 25, God laid out the stipulations for the Jubilee year. The Jubilee enacted three sweeping reforms designed to prevent the emergence of a permanently poor or enslaved class. If an Israelite fell into desperate poverty and was forced to sell their family land to survive, that sale was never permanent. In the 50th year, all agricultural land automatically reverted to its original family or tribal clan at no cost. In the Jubilee year, the enslaved were granted unconditional freedom to return home. Like the ordinary Sabbatical year, the soil was given complete rest. The people were forbidden to sow fields, prune vineyards, or harvest crops for commercial storage. They were to eat only what grew naturally of its own accord
The inauguration of the Jubilee Year was set in motion by a specific blast on the Day of Atonement. Leviticus 25:9 says:
Then you shall cause the trumpet of the Jubilee to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement you shall make the trumpet sound throughout all your land.
In the biblical period, the central High Court in Jerusalem sounded the shofar first. As soon as the shofar was sounded from the court, every individual throughout the towns, villages, and countryside who possessed a horn was commanded to sound it as well. Watchmen on hilltops caught the blast and passed it from valley to valley. Within moments, the entire land of Israel resounded with the overlapping, continuous blasts of rams’ horns.
When the blast reached every community, Hebrew laborers who had bound themselves into service because of poverty were instantly emancipated and returned to their families (Lev 25:10). All agricultural tracts sold over the previous 49 years reverted to their original clan allotments. Contracts were dissolved, deeds reset, and the original families regained their ancestral heritage.
Rosh Hashanah
This brings us to the holiday with which the shofar is most synonymous: Rosh Hashanah.
Rosh Hashanah means in Hebrew, “Head of the Year.” It is observed on the first and second days of the autumn month of Tishrei, which usually falls in September. The name Rosh Hashanah never appears in the Old Testament. Instead, it is described as “The Day of the Horn Blast” (Num 29:1) and “A Memorial Proclaimed with Blasts” (Lev 23:24). Jewish tradition marks it as the anniversary of the creation of the world—specifically the creation of humanity on the sixth day—and the day on which God is re-enthroned as the Sovereign and Judge of all creation.
In the original biblical economy, the central communal holidays were the three agricultural pilgrimage festivals (Shalosh Regalim): Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. However, during the Second Temple and early rabbinic eras, the first ten days of the seventh month took on their own significance. Rosh Hashanah came to be understood not as an isolated event, but as the opening gate of the Ten Days of Repentance or Days ofAwe. This solemn season reaches its climax ten days later on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
The sages taught that on Rosh Hashanah, the Heavenly Court convenes and opens three symbolic books before God: one for the wholly righteous, one for the wicked, and one for the intermediate majority whose fates hang in the balance. These individuals are granted the ten-day corridor between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to examine their lives through repentance, prayer, and acts of restorative justice or charity.
Still, despite its richer meaning developed over the centuries, Rosh Hashanah is, at its biblical essence, the day of the horn blast. The biblical text commands a horn blast but does not define the sound. The Talmudic rabbis introduced that tradition. They developed shofar liturgy. On Rosh Hashanah, the first blast is a single, long, steady blast representing clarity, wholeness, and royalty. The second time the shofar is blown it should be three broken, sighing blasts that sound like quiet groaning. The third shofar blow should include nine rapid, staccato notes, like frantic weeping or an urgent siren. The last blast goes for as long as the shofar blower has breath to give. Each pattern is sounded three times, creating the foundational thirty blasts required by Jewish law. Throughout the extended service, these sets are repeated until a total of one hundred blasts echo through the sanctuary.
The Shofar in the New Testament
In Matthew 24, when Jesus was describing the end of the age, he said, “And he will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.” Jesus was calling back to Isaiah 27:13, which prophesied that on that day, a Great Shofar would sound to gather the scattered exiles back to the holy mountain.
The Apostle Paul takes this even further in his letters to the early churches. In his letter to the Corinthians about the end of the age, he said: “Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed” (1 Cor 15:51–52).
And in his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul paints the definitive portrait of the Second Coming: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thess 4:16).
When the New Testament speaks of the Second Coming of Jesus, the trumpet is not just a musical fanfare. It is an ontological command. Just as God spoke and creation sprang into being, and just as the shofar at Sinai caused the earth to quake, the “Trumpet of God” sounds as the cosmic instrument of resurrection. It pierces the grave, calling those who sleep in the dust to awaken into imperishable life.
In Revelation, seven trumpets herald the unfolding judgments of God. With the seventh trumpet blast, loud voices in heaven declare: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).
As we conclude, the message of the shofar rings clear across thousands of years. It began as an animal horn tangled in a briar patch on Mount Moriah, pointing to God’s mercy. It sounded over a smoking mountain at Sinai, establishing his covenant. It brought down walls at Jericho, reminding us that salvation belongs to the Lord. It sounds each year at Rosh Hashanah to awaken souls from spiritual slumber. And according to the New Testament, it awaits that final, glorious blast—when the trumpet of God shall sound, the dead shall rise, and the King shall reign supreme.
That’s it for this week. Join me next week as we return to Deuteronomy for the shortest reading cycle for the year. Its all about Deuteronomy 32, what is also known as the Song of Moses.
Shabbat Shalom