The Trumpet Sounds, the Number Doesn’t: Why 5787 has no prophetic meaning

It’s one of the beautiful ironies of early Church history: for the first few centuries, many believers continued attending synagogue. They understood that their faith hadn’t appeared out of nowhere. It was rooted in the Hebrew Bible, and the synagogue was still a place where they could learn the Scriptures.

I see the same instinct today when believers mark what’s commonly called “Rosh Hashanah” — what Scripture actually calls “Yom Teruah,” or “The Feast of Trumpets.” Honoring the appointed times God gave His people is good and healthy. As Messianic Jews in Israel, we join with the nation in bringing in the new year (even though it's not a new year—more on that in a minute).

5787 — WHAT DOES IT MEAN!?

But every year around this time, my inbox fills with a different kind of question. People want to know what the number of the new Hebrew year means — this year, 5787. One person frantically emailed me because their friend disagreed with them over the meaning. They’ve been told by a teacher somewhere that the number carries prophetic weight, that the specific Hebrew month carries prophetic weight, that some hidden pattern in the calendar is about to unlock what God is doing next. When I’ve asked some of these teachers to show me the theology behind it, I’ve never once received an answer. One even got super offended when I asked. And that is deeply concerning. Rather than answer, he angrily complained about me to a mutual friend, as if asking was out of line.

My concern is that many of the alleged prophetic ministers talking about the significance of the Jewish New Year have no real training in Judaism or biblical Hebrew. This is a fairly recent phenomenon that didn't exist during the previous 2,000 years of Church history. The historic Church (with all its problems), across every major stream — patristic, medieval, Reformation, and the birth of modern Pentecostalism/charismatic movements — never developed a tradition of assigning prophetic meaning to the Hebrew calendar year number itself. Someone could make the case that this is because the Church has been largely defensive toward Judaism—and that is a fair point. But we don't see it in the first Messianic-led congregation that is represented in the book of Acts (one reason is that the numbering that we use today did not exist for another thousand years!) [see footnote below].

IS THERE BIBLICAL PRECEDENT?

But as best I can tell, there’s no precedent for this anywhere in the Old or New Covenant.

And there are a few problems with this teaching that we need to discuss:

No one actually knows if 5787 is the correct number. There’s no reliable way to calculate it with certainty that the Earth was created exactly 5787 years ago. And Rosh Hashanah, despite the name, isn’t the biblical new year at all — the new year is Nisan 1, in the Spring, just ahead of Passover. What we call Rosh Hashanah falls on the first day of the SEVENTH month (Leviticus 23), not the first.

The Babylonian influence runs deeper than most realize: during the exile after 586 BCE, the Jewish people adopted not just the Babylonian month names — the very names some of these teachers now assign prophetic meaning to — but the Babylonian new year itself, which began in the Fall.

None of this makes the tradition wrong to keep. There’s nothing wrong with carrying customs from the culture you live in. The problem starts when we take a tradition and begin treating it as if God revealed it in Scripture. Let me be clear—if there were prophetic significance to the new year, it would be in spring, not fall. What we celebrated a few weeks ago is in the Bible called the "Feast of Trumpets," in the Torah, not the Jewish New Year.

WHAT THE HEBREW PROPHETS SAID

Here’s what I don’t find anywhere in the prophets: Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the others never speak of prophetic meaning attached to a number or a date on its own. A true prophet could certainly say, “On this day, God will do this.” That’s different from teaching that every Tishrei is inherently the “month of grace,” or every Kislev the “month of abundance,” as a fixed, repeating rule. Scripture simply doesn’t say that. To me, it looks like something we’ve invented to give people what their ears want to hear. 

Here’s the pattern Scripture actually shows: God judges a nation because of sin.

When He blesses a nation, it’s because of righteousness. It is never because of what number the year happened to be. When God spoke of the Amorites, He didn’t give Abraham a year to watch for — He said judgment would come when their SIN had reached its full measure (Genesis 15:16). The timing was tied to conduct, not to a calendar.

OBSCURES THE TRUE MEANING

Let me be clear. Looking for hidden meaning in 5787 is deception. I don't say that lightly, and I don't say it to be mean. It's just not in the Bible. It's great for marketing, but it's a practice that is foreign to the apostles. And I know deception is a strong word, but when we start looking for spiritual meaning in things that don't exist, we miss what does. The Feast of Trumpets is meant to bring our attention to the return of Yeshua. That is what the trumpet is about (1 Thess. 4:16, Rev. 11:15). Nothing is more precious in terms of prophecy than the coming of Messiah. Turning this feast into a new year, then ascribing different meanings every year, puts our attention on the wrong thing.

THE LESSON OF 2020

I think back to 2020, when “the year of 20/20 vision” was everywhere — the promise of clarity, of seeing rightly. Not one of those prophetic voices saw the pandemic coming, even as it was already spreading while the predictions were being made. Shawn Bolz, one of the more prominent prophetic voices at the time, now disgraced, released a video in January 2020 calling it a year of “accumulation” — blessing, increase, things gathering in. Then, at the end of February, he prophesied the end of coronavirus—and then millions died.

2020 turned out to be one of the most devastating years in recent memory. And for what it’s worth, 2020 isn’t even a Hebrew calendar year — 5780 was, and that one came with its own promise: that this would be “the decade of the prophet,” built on the letter "peh" for 80, meaning “mouth.” It was supposed to be the decade of the prophet, and it began with a pandemic that the prophets did not see. That year ended with massive false prophecy regarding the 2020 election and its supposed overturning, which we were told would come in January, then March, then August. Prophets said the election would be overturned in the House of Representatives, and others prophesied it would be in the Supreme Court. They were all wrong.

Honestly, looking back, this decade hasn’t been the decade of the prophet in the way it was sold to us. It’s been far more the decade of exposing manipulation and abuse within the office of the prophet — the corruption and sexual sin uncovered in ministry after ministry. I don’t remember anyone predicting that when they were explaining the prophetic meaning of the numbers. And if it were the prophecy, I doubt it would have been adopted so eagerly. This has been a decade of the exploitation of the Body of believers by so-called prophets. They prey on our deep desire to hear from God, and unleash vague prophecies about the future with tremendous authority.

The truth is, 2020 should have been a year for us to learn. 5780 did not usher in the decade of the prophet as we were promised. And sadly, many in the charismatic world have an unhealthy obsession with these predictions. It doesn’t matter how many times the prophets get it wrong; they want more. This is a cheap substitute for genuine intimacy. We often prefer formulas over actually building a friendship with God.

A CLOSING THOUGHT

None of this is meant to shame anyone drawn into these teachings — most people who ask me about “5787” are sincere, hungry to understand what God might be doing, and trusting leaders who seemed confident. That hunger is good. I just think that hunger needs to be directed toward something more biblical than a year's number, which is not actually accurate. He’s asked us to walk in righteousness, to watch our own hearts, and to trust Him with the timing that belongs to Him alone. I would rather build my faith on that than on someone’s interpretation of a calendar.

P.S. If someone actually has a theology from the Bible about the Jewish New Year having prophetic significance every year, I would be glad to hear it. This recent tradition has been around just long enough that you would expect someone to write a book showing how all these amazing predictions came to pass. Unfortunately, I don’t expect to see one. I haven't heard one person say, “Remember in year X, the Hebrew Year of XXXX…that the prophets said, ‘XX,’ and it happened just as they predicted?” I don’t hear this. If there is a theology behind it, I would love to see it. Truly.

Footnote - The Hebrew year count we use today (5787, etc.) didn't exist yet in New Testament times. A rabbi worked it out about 200 years after Yeshua by calculating backward from Scripture's genealogies, and it didn't become the standard way Jews dated things until roughly 1,000 years later. So Yeshua, the apostles, and the entire New Testament story took place without anyone ever using a number like "5787" — that system simply wasn't in use yet. Placing prophetic meaning on it is more gimmick than serious theology.