Another shemitah year has come and gone. And the world as we know it has … well, it has carried on pretty much as before. Shemitah years, also spelled as shmita, have ancient roots dating back 3,000 years and are grounded in the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel and still observed in contemporary Judaism. During a shemitah year, the land is left to lie fallow.
More recently, some Wall Street analysts have pondered the mystery of what appears to be seven-year economic cycles tied to shemitah years. And wondered why crashes often seem to come in September and October. While we’re only halfway through that two-month period and the financial sky has yet to exactly fall, investors had a brief scare in August when China’s currency, known as the yuan or renminbi, fell in value more than it did in the previous two decades.
The Shanghai Composite Index tumbled 8.5 on Aug. 24 – erasing the last of its gains for the year in its biggest single-day loss since 2007. The Shanghai Composite Index has plummeted nearly 40 percent since hitting a peak earlier this year.
Within minutes after the opening bell Aug. 24, the Dow Jones plummeted 1,089 points, the largest point loss ever during a trading day, surpassing the trillion-dollar “Flash Crash” of May 6, 2010, which started at 2:32 p.m. EDT and lasted for approximately 36 minutes, sending the Dow down 998.5 points, its biggest intra-day trading drop until Monday. The Dow closed down 588 points Aug. 24, the worst one-day for the Dow since August 2011.
Brent crude, the benchmark for oil prices worldwide, closed Aug. 24 at $42.80 a barrel, its lowest close since March 11, 2009. Oil prices tumbled more than five per cent Aug. 24, with U.S. light crude closing at $38.24 a barrel, its lowest close February 2009. The week of Aug. 16-22 marked oil prices’ longest weekly losing streak since 1986. Today, Brent Crude LCOc1, the key indicator for global crude prices, was selling for $47.34 a barrel; meaning there has been no significant recovery in price over the last month or so, nor is any expected anytime soon.
And while the Shanghai Composite Index and China have been making most of the bad-news financial headlines of late, consider this:
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average all-time closing high was 18,312.39, set on May 19. The Dow closed at 16,001.89 today, down 2,310.5 points from its peak 4½ months ago;
- British stocks are down about 16 percent from the peak of the market;
- French stocks have declined nearly 18 percent;
- Italian stocks are already down 15 percent.
Jonathan Cahn is a New Jersey-born messianic Jewish rabbi, meaning he accepts Jesus Christ as the messiah, and is best known for his book The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future, in which he compares the United States and the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on America to the destruction of ancient Israel. He started Railroad Avenue Hope of the World Ministries in Lodi, New Jersey in 1988 as “an end-time ministry for an end-time world,” describing it as being devoted to “giving out the Word of God to all peoples – to fulfill the Biblical mandate and Great Commission of God – to bring salvation to the Jew, to the Gentile, and to all unreached peoples of every land.”
In his sequel to The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future, called The Mystery of the Shemitah: The 3,000-Year-Old Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future, the World’s Future, and Your Future!, Cahn argued that the five great economic crashes of the last 40 years – 1973, 1980, 1987, 2001 and 2008 – all occurred in shemitah years. The book rocketed to become an instant bestseller, listed at number eight overall on Amazon.com, and number one in Amazon’s Christian prophecies section.
Cahn argued if the Shemitah was not observed by the people, it would become a curse, as described later in Leviticus Chapter 25 in the Bible’s Old Testament. That’s what happened, Cahn said in 586 B.C., a shemitah year, when the First Temple in Jerusalem fell and the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah went into captivity in Babylon for 70 years. The year following the destruction of the rebuilt Second Temple on the original site of Solomon’s Temple in 70 A.D. was the first year of the seven-year sabbatical cycle. In the Jewish calendar, counting from creation, this was year 3829. By counting sevens from then the next shemitah year will be the year 5775 after creation, which runs from Sept. 25, 2014 through Sept. 13, 2015.
Deuteronomy, another Old Testament book, says in Chapter 15, “At the end of every seven years you shall grant a remission of debts. “This is the manner of remission: every creditor shall release what he has loaned to his neighbor; he shall not exact it of his neighbor and his brother, because the Lord’s remission has been proclaimed…” Before you decide to stiff the bank on your October mortgage payment, it might well be worth noting it is not a carte blanche release apparently, as the same chapter in Deuteronomy also says, “You may collect from the alien, but if you have any claim against your brother for a debt, you must relinquish it….”
Cahn said shemitah can have several meanings. It can mean a “release” – and in ancient Israel debts were canceled and land returned to its original owners,
But it can also mean “to fall, to collapse, to shake,” he said.
Back beyond the five great economic crashes of the last 40 years in 1973, 1980, 1987, 2001 and 2008, during the Great Depression, a solar eclipse took place 83 years ago on Sept. 12, 1931 – the end of a shemitah year. Eight days later, England abandoned the gold standard, setting off further market crashes and bank failures around the world. It also heralded in the greatest month-long stock market crash calculated on a percentage basis in Wall Street history.
But Cahn was guarded and careful not to predict what would happen in the recently completed shemitah year.
“The phenomenon may manifest in one cycle and not in another and then again in the next,” he wrote. “And the focus of the message is not date-setting but the call of God to repentance and return. At the same time, something of significance could take place, and it is wise to note the times.”
Cahn also noted the fact that 2014 and 2015 are marked by a series of blood moons – a pattern that began on Passover 2014 and will conclude on the Feast of Tabernacles in 2015. There was one last night, accompanied by a full lunar eclipse.
April 15, 2014 marked the first Blood Moon of the 21st century. In astronomical terms, the total lunar eclipse on April 15, 2014 was the 56th eclipse of the Saros 122 series, a series that began on Aug. 14, 1022 and is composed of 74 lunar eclipses in the following sequence: 22 penumbral, eight partial, 28 total, seven partial, and nine penumbral eclipses. The last eclipse of the series is on Oct. 29, 2338.
Blood moon is a term of more religious than astronomical significance. In the Old Testament Book of Joel, Chapter 2, verse 31, the minor prophet says: “And I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.”
In Bible prophecy, this is always first and foremost about Israel and the Middle East, and what, if anything, such portents hold. The April 2014 and April 2015 total lunar eclipses align with the Jewish Feast of Passover. The October 2014 and September 2015 total lunar eclipses aligned with the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles. Yori Yanover, writing in the Brooklyn, New York-based Jewish Press Oct. 6, 2013 observed, “The prophecy in Joel, like most prophecies, is surreal, beautiful, and open to many interpretations.” But he also notes that two of these Blood Moons will “shine over the Passover seder” on April 15, 2014 and April 4, 2015. “Whenever this happened in the past, enormous events took place in Jewish history.”
The tetrad phenomenon of a string of four Blood Moons, partially or completely eclipsed, last occurred twice in the 20th century – and both times on the night of the Passover seder in 1949-50 and 1967-68. The first came after the establishment of the State of Israel, which resulted in Israel officially taking a seat at the United Nations on Nov. 5, 1949, while the latter occurred after the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel re-captured the Old City that included the Temple Mount for the first time since 70 AD.
The last Blood Moons tetrad before the 20th century was in 1493-94 – a year after the Christian expulsion of Jews from Spain by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic monarchs.
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