a loud, ringing sound raised by a crowd together: a battle cry, a signal blast on a horn, or a shout of acclamation and joy.
This is one word for a huge, unified sound made by a crowd. It is never a quiet or private noise. The Bible always speaks of the sound being raised, mustered, or sounded out together, whether by an army, a worshiping congregation, or the horns that lead them. Picture the roar a stadium makes as one body, not a single person's cry.
The same word covers a battle roar, the blast of a horn, and the shout of a worshiping crowd because in ancient Israel those worlds ran together. The army that charged with a war cry, the congregation that hailed God as king, and the priests who sounded the trumpets were all making one recognizable kind of sound: loud, ringing, and shared. So the exact sense comes from the scene, not from the word on its own.
That is also why translators cannot settle on a single English word for it.
- In a war it is a battle cry or an alarm.
- Around the ark or the temple it is a shout of acclamation and joy.
- Blown on a horn it is a signal blast.
Sometimes the human voices and the horns sound at once, and the word simply names the whole wall of sound rather than picking out one part of it.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the word's original sense is the vocal war cry or the instrumental blast, and, relatedly, whether it names primarily a human shout or a horn blast.
- majorityThe vocal war cry or alarm is the older sense, and the instrumental blast developed from it; the related verb never describes a private cry, only a mustered collective shout.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. רוע / תרועה; P. Humbert and R. Ficker, "רוע / תרועה," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT) XIII; Paul Humbert, La "Terou'a": Analyse d'un rite biblique (Neuchatel, 1946)
- minorityThe blast on a horn or trumpet is the original sense, and the meaning later widened to take in human shouting.; Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (Jerusalem: Carta, 1987), s.v.
- contestedIn the Priestly texts the term is genuinely dual, naming both the human shout and the trumpet blast, so no single origin need be chosen.; Jacob Milgrom, Numbers, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS, 1990), 72-74, 372-373
Which instrument the biblical Day of Teruah (Leviticus 23:24; Numbers 29:1) called for, since the text itself names none.
- contestedThe silver trumpet: in the Priestly law only priests sound the silver trumpets, and the ancient Greek translation of Leviticus 23:24 supplies trumpets, so the day's instrument is most likely the trumpet.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23-27, Anchor Bible 3B (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 2011-2015
- contestedThe ram's horn: classical Jewish tradition settled the day's sound on the ram's horn, the instrument still used for it.; Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 3:2-4; Babylonian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 33b-34a