Blood Moons Came and Went, and Still No Collapse. What Will They Say Next?
Is it all going to stop now? The blood moons are over. The alleged Shemitah is a year gone, and now the highly dubious Jubilee year just ended. And none of the financial asteroids arrived. And between the tetrad and the Jubilee, they had three years to do it, a pretty big target.
The Blood Moon thing had been hyped to the max: TV appearances, a book, another book, another book, study guides for the books, DVDs, a documentary about the life of Rabbi Cahn, and that's just Cahn's work, add Mark Biltz and John Hagee and that's more books, more study guides, a feature length film, more ways to separate frightened people from their money.
And as three of the lunar eclipses came and went there were no market collapses, not cataclysms. But instead of retraction, the Blood Moon Industry doubled down saying that the fourth blood moon would be the big one. Market collapse could be predicted down to the date, down even to the very hour, said Cahn as he recommended that people not have money in the stock market that day. Not only was it a Blood Moon, and the fourth of a tetrad (four lunar eclipses roughly six months apart), but it was also on a Shemitah, that is the seventh year of a cycle of debt remission. This makes it a 'super Shemitah' something big has got to happen.
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But nothing did. It was a pretty normal day in the market. Around the world some markets went up, some went down.
Cahn, grasping at straws, in a video statement (which I viewed but can no longer locate) pointed to a thousand point drop in India's stock market (a fairly normal drop in a market that has generally done quite well since) as an example of the fulfillment of his predictions. Why India suddenly matters in Shemitah world is not explained. It was not a nation which Cahn had previously discussed as being key. His alleged proofs of the Shemitah and Blood Moon patterns had never used Indian data before and he gives no reason why India is in any way specially tied to Israel or prophecy. This use of data is basically a textbook example of statistical abuse.
Without getting too deeply into the mathematical details, every time Cahn or his acolytes have to admit a new market into their body of evidence, they unwittingly weaken their case. For example, when Cahn sets forth his list of market collapses every seven years, he also runs into years which fall on Shemitahs (if they really are Shemitahs) in which the market does quite well. So then he has to turn from a stock market collapse to a bond market collapse. The problem is that once he includes bond markets or Indian markets collapses into the mix, then he also inadvertently includes every time in which there was a Shemitah year and the bond or Indian stock market did not collapse. All this weakens his mathematical case. But he's not selling sound mathematics: he's selling hype and fear.
So, what do you do when you've been selling a doom and gloom prophetic scenario and none of it comes true? You need an extension. Enter, the Jubilee.
According to the Bible, Israel was supposed to practice debt remission every seven years (that's the Shemitah) and then they were supposed to practice a return of ancestral land after every seven Shemitahs (that's the Jubilee). But how do we modern Americans know which Shemitah is the seventh? Israel knew, because God gave them a starting point. The entry into the promised land was the initiation of their cycle Shemitah/Jubilee cycle. But the records of that cycle are lost in antiquity.
Cahn admits that. So how does he know when the Shemitahs are timed now? Basically he guesses. He says the Jews were given their land back in 1917, so since land was reclaimed, then it must be a Jubilee? Got it? Me neither.
Israel did not get their land back in 1917. They got a non-binding promise called the Balfour Declaration (that's why it's a declaration and not a treaty or contract). But they didn't get the land back. Hardly any Jews moved to Israel in 1917 and when they did, they could not form a government. They didn't get their land back until 1948. So using Cahn's reasoning would make 1948 the Jubilee, and then the next one would be 1998 (no help there) and the one after that would be 2048, which is an awfully long time to wait to sell books and videos and certainly no way to strike while the iron is hot.
All this is not the biggest problem with this mathematically challenged line of thinking. In his recent work, Cahn took the unusual view that the Jubilee was not a separate year, but instead coincided with a the Shemitah. That does not seem to match Leviticus 25, and not the view most rabbis have. So why take that view? Well Cahn had done research finding significant events in history of Israel and/or the U.S. every seven years going back to 1903. 1903, 7, 14, 23, 31, 38, 45, 52, 59, 66, 73, 80, 87, 94, 2001, 2008, 2015.
He needed things to line up with 2015 because that's good for his publication schedule. Plus he wanted to get 2001 and 2008 in the mix because of the highly publicized market collapses. That schema also gives him 1917 with the the Balfour Declaration and 73 gets him the Yom Kippur war. Apart from the these, the rest of these dates are pretty much duds: a mix of shifting back and forth from Hebrew to Julian calendar or minor events like minor bond bear markets.
When 2015 came and went with nothing to show for it, he needed an extension. So he suddenly needed a separate Jubilee! He needed 2016 to be a Jubilee. Which means his previous time line has to be completely thrown out.
Dozens of amazing coincidental dates which inspired and excited the readers of the book which got it all started were now quietly dropped down the memory hole, and Cahn came back to the traditional view that the Jubilee is a separate year from the seventh Shemitah and that the next Jubilee fell on … you guessed it, 2016, a year well within publishing schedule. But if 2016 is a Jubilee, than so was 1966. Was 1966 a bad economy year? No, it was one of what had been nicknamed the go-go years (like the boots). Economy was great. The market was down, but not enough to qualify as a correction, let alone a collapse.
If 1966 was Jubilee than so was 1916. A bad year for the economy? Nope, GDP was making a nice recovery from the initial shock of WWI. A big history year for the US? Not really, the big year was the following year when we got into a global war. A big year for Israel? No, there was no Israel yet.
Cahn juggles two conflicting chronologies and seems to shift back and forth between them to whichever one allows him to keep his audience focused on the year in their immediate book and DVD buying future.
But every good thing must come to an end, and so must the Blood Moon Merchandising industry.
Earlier this month was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. That means that the Jewish year just ended. No market collapse, not the US stock market, not the bond market, not the Indian Market.
In fact, the general view floating around in these circles and promoted on Cahn's Facebook page was that the end of the Jubilee year was lining up with the inclusion of China's currency in the SDR in the beginning of October, leading to a dollar collapse. Instead the dollar has performed quite well since then, which didn't stop Cahn from posting an article about a minor reversal of the dollar's bull market. Anyone who listened to the endless predictions for prophesy buffs and fear mongers bought gold to hedge against the falling dollar and if they did, they incurred substantial losses. So the Blood Moon Industry has managed to find another way to separate decent, and trusting people from their money.
