Where Do the Names of the Shofar Calls Come From?

The words for Rosh Hashanah’s three shofar calls—the t’ki’ah, the sh’varim, and the tru’ah—are all ancient. Where do they and the sounds denoted by them come from?

The t’ki’ah, linguistically and acoustically, is the simplest. The biblical verb taka’, followed by the preposition b’, means to play or blow into a wind instrument, and a t’ki’ah is a single long breath blown into the shofar, usually lasting three or four seconds and ending on an emphatic note. Unlike the noun, the verb occurs in many places in the Bible, in which blowing one or more blasts on a ram’s horn or trumpet sounds an alert or signals a solemn occasion.

Such blasts were associated by the rabbis with Rosh Hashanah because of the verse in the book of Psalms, “Blow ye [tik’u] the shofar at the time of the new moon, at its covering [ba-keseh] on our feast day.” Since Rosh Hashanah is the only major biblical holiday to fall at the beginning of the lunar month, when the barely visible or invisible moon is “covered,” this verse was taken to refer to it, and every sequence of shofar calls in the Rosh Hashanah service starts and ends with a t’ki’ah.