By Daniel Abraham and Shmuli Phillips
The holiday season which spans Rosh Hashanah through Simchat Torah lies at the heart of modern Judaism. Various scholarly critiques have attempted to portray these celebrations as post-biblical rabbinic innovations. Last year this group featured a response (based on an essay in Judaism Reclaimed), to claims that Sukkot was never celebrated in the first Temple era (linked in comments).
This post addresses an article from Project TABS which claims that Rosh Hashanah – featuring shofar- blowing and divine judgement – has no basis in the Torah and was not observed as the Jewish New Year until the late second Temple period. As with several articles that we have previously analysed from the thetorah .com website, we demonstrate that this claim (attributed to “Project TABS Editors”) can be effectively countered both from archaeological discoveries and biblical sources.
Archaeological Sources
Starting with the archaeological evidence for Jewish observance of Rosh Hashanah as a new year and day of judgment, an Egyptian papyrus from the mid-4th century BCE (known as Papyrus Amherst 63) contains three prayers that originated in the Kingdom of Israel before the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE. This papyrus provides a valuable insight into the beliefs and practices of the early Israelites, describing a day of the New Moon on which there is a solemn banquet for the God during which He determines destinies for the year to come. The prayers also focus on the theme of appointing God as King and celebrate God’s kingship over all other gods. In combination, these various elements point to a New Year’s festival— which scholars understand to be evidence of the historicity of the early Jewish celebration of Rosh Hashanah (read more about the papyrus here).
Finally, it has been convincingly argued by Edwin R. Thiele in The Mysterious Numbers of the Hebrew Kings, that the Kings of Judah counted the years of their reigns from Tishrei, suggesting that this was seen as some form of new year in the first Temple period in the Judaean kingdom too. Though this theory is not unanimously accepted, it has gained a wide acceptance among scholars.
Biblical Sources
The claim by “Project TABS Editors” that Rosh Hashanah was a post-biblical, rabbinic invention, is based on the absence of any biblical description of such a Jewish new year, coupled with a lack of reference to it in biblical accounts of Jewish first Temple history. Against the backdrop of scholarly evidence for Rosh Hashanah as a Jewish new year – a time of divine judgment and recognising God’s kingship – we will now examine some important biblical sources.
While the project TABS article is correct in noting that Rosh Hashanah is not included in the list of festivals in the book of Exodus, we do however find that both references to Sukkot in this book describe it as being celebrated at the turn of the year (23:16, 34:22). These passages in Exodus (along with Deuteronomy 16), are primarily focused on the laws of the pilgrimage to the Temple and therefore address only with laws unique to the three Pilgrimage Festivals. They nevertheless make it clear that Sukkot is celebrated at the time of the Jewish new year.
Other passages containing further laws of the festivals, which can be found in the books of Leviticus and Numbers, make explicit reference to a celebration on the first day of Tishrei as a “Yom Teruah” and “Yom Zichron Teruah”. What might be the nature and significance of such a special festive “Yom Teruah” – a celebration that, we have seen from the book of Exodus, takes place at the time of the Jewish new year?
Shortly after the Leviticus reference to the first day of Tishrei as a day of “teruah”, we find a description of a different “teruah” requirement in the Tishrei of the Jubilee Year (the “Yovel”): “You shall proclaim [with] the shofar-teruah, in the seventh month, on the tenth of the month…”. A clear connection between “teruah” and shofar blasts. And what might be the significance of Shofar blasts at the time of the Jewish new year?
The book of Psalms provides a crucial missing link here, with Psalm 98 stating:
“Blast [a word that shares the same root as teruah] with trumpets and the sound of a shofar before God the King....Before the Lord, for He has come to judge the earth; He will judge the inhabited world justly...”
We have therefore found explicit reference in the Torah to the start of Tishrei as a new year, a day of shofar blasts -- blasts which the book of Psalms connects to the theme of recognising God’s sovereignty and passing judgment over the world. This is precisely the sort of celebration that archaeological sources indicate was observed by ancient Israelites in the first Temple period.
While it is true, as the TABS article points out, that Nechemiah’s Temple dedication in Tishrei does not make mention of a Rosh Hashanah celebration (including the biblically mandated shofar blasts), this is likely to be because the passage is only describing aspects of celebration which relate explicitly to the unique dedication events of that year (as discussed by Dov Zakhjem in Nehemiah: Statesman and Sage, Maggid Press, p 158). The Nechemiah celebrations, in the context of the festival of Sukkot, are discussed here.
In conclusion, despite the superficially persuasive presentation of this attack on the authenticity of Jewish tradition, careful analysis of the biblical text in the context of available archaeological evidence demonstrates that it is deeply flawed. The concept of Rosh Hashanah as a Jewish new year in Tishrei considerably precedes the extra-biblical Second -Temple sources that the Project TABS article cites extensively. It must be questioned whether this essay from Project TABS (“Torah and Biblical Scholarship”) accurately portrays either Torah or true scholarship on this matter.
First posted on Facebook 19 September 2021, here.
