I’ve been posting a lot of sort of religious stuff here lately and for those who read my blog and are a bit turned off by this, I apologize. Book reviews forthcoming! I am kind of a religion nerd especially where traditions, ritual and odd beliefs are concerned. I find it endlessly fascinating. Sometimes, something religious has something to do with natural phenomena and things get really weird. When English speaking people are concerned it gets weird, arrogant and just a little stupid. This whole blood moon thing that’s going around on Facebook and everywhere else shows English speaking arrogance in spades, and how dumb some people can be when they don’t think past their own noses.
What’s A Blood Moon?
For centuries in the English speaking world, possibly thousands of years, there have been creative names for celestial events. Some of them ominous sounding. I used to be pretty heavy into astronomy and never heard the term “Blood Moon” applied to a lunar eclipse (though the moon does appear red sometimes after one). There is however a “Blood Moon” that occurs every year, once a year according to folklore. When someone told me there’d be four Blood Moons in a year, my immediate question was, “So four Harvest moons? Neat.” I had mistakenly thought the Harvest Moon was just a low, full moon that appears orange or red, and usually happens late in the year. So what I had considered was that there was some weird circumstance where there would be a full or nearly full moon four days in a row. Of course this makes no sense.
The actual common lunar event called the “Blood Moon” is just another name for the “Hunter’s Moon” which is the full moon after the Harvest Moon. So it’s the second full moon after the Fall Equinox. However some preacher here in Texas has hijacked the term, and started calling all lunar eclipses “Blood Moons”, jacking up who knows how many centuries of tradition to sell books.
Why Would Lunar Eclipses Be The End of the World?
Well these lunar eclipses fall in a tetrad, meaning four total lunar eclipses in a row. They’re also fairly close together which isn’t uncommon in the grand scheme of things, it at least sounds unusual.
What’s special about these is that they fall on the Jewish holidays of Passover and Tabernacles. There’s also some solar event happening on another Jewish holiday in between somewhere that a few of these prophets of doom have stuck in there. They have a lot to say about how, “God controls the earth and moon and has made this all line up. In the past five hundred years this has only happened a few times and when it has it’s been important for the Jews.” Well, OK. Let’s look at this objectively before we start getting all scared because of a few lunar eclipses. Here’s some data points.
- The Jewish Calendar is a Lunar Calendar. Each day starts and ends at night.
- Each month begins and ends on the New Moon.
- There’s a special 13th month every so often to ‘reset the calendar’ (all lunar calendars have to do this).
- Total Lunar Eclipses always occur during full moons.
- Passover starts on the fourteen day of the Jewish month of Nisan. Tabernacles starts on the 15th day of Tishri.
- The fourteenth and fifteenth day of any lunar month in the Jewish calendar falls on the full moon.
- Passover and Tabernacles, always, always, always start on a full moon. On purpose.
- Thus, a lunar eclipse is bound to happen on Passover and Tabernacles at some point.
So when you have a lunar tetrad the Jewish holiday cycle is just set up begging to have lunar eclipses on their holidays, since they practically all start on the night of a full moon. So is it God manipulating the orbit of the moon and planet? Simple coincidence? Or is it when you set up a lunar calendar and put all your holidays on full moons it’s inevitable this is going to happen?
Spoiler alert: It’s the last one. It’s inevitable. These lunar cycles are predictable. You can predict them far into the future, and far into the past.
This eclipse cycle falling on Passover and Tabernacles has happened eight times in the past two thousand years. And regular one off eclipses falling on Jewish holy days has happened hundreds of times since they’ve been celebrating them.
So It’s Inevitable, It’s Happened Before, And Every Time It’s Been Bad For The Jews.
It’s happened before, eight times in the last two thousand years. It’s happened quite a lot before that too, but I can’t be bothered to look at NASA’s charts and try to figure it all out pre-1AD. I think the past two millennial is enough to make my point. So let’s look at these grand omens that happened in the past and how it related to the Jews and how precise God was with warning them.
1492 – Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand tell Jews to get out of Spain if they don’t convert to Roman Catholicism. Forty thousand to two hundred thousand Jews not wanting to convert to Roman Catholicism get the hell out of Spain. Learning of their hardship Sultan Bayezid II (A name they should be teaching in school) of the Ottoman Empire sends out his Navy to make sure they get safely to the lands he rules. They end up mostly in Greece and Turkey.
Columbus “discovers” the New World.
1493 – 1494 – God manipulates the orbit of the moon and earth warning the Jews of their expulsion from Spain a year earlier by making four lunar eclipses in a row on their holy days. Thank goodness!
1948 – Israel basically becomes an independent country! They kick the British out! USA! I mean ISRAEL! This is widely regarded as a mistake and makes a lot of people very angry. Kicks off the Arab-Israeli war. Also sometime in here kicks off a war with Syria. Israel also gets its first President, sadly he won’t start his term for a while.
1949-1950 – God manipulates the orbit of the moon and earth warning the Jews of the bad times they’re about to have with their neighbors a full year after the fact by making some lunar eclipses occur on their holy days four times in a row. Thank goodness for that. Fortunately they end the war with Syria after nineteen months, so there is that.
1967 – The famed six day war in Israel. A bunch of crap happens between Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Israel. A war that lasts six days starts. Israel basically wins.
1967-1968 – God manipulates the orbit of the moon and earth warning the Jews of the bad times they’re about to have with their neighbors. Well actually it’s right on time this time, and the main conflict lasts six days. It actually didn’t suck too bad for them this time. It’s mostly over before the eclipses are though.
So that’s what happened the last three times. Yeah there were some things that happened to some populations of Jews, but as you can see it didn’t actually happen the years the tetrads happened. Except in 1967. So what about the four times before 1493?
162-163 – Nothing of note seems to have happened to any significant Jewish population. The Armenians did get stomped by the Romans though. The Armenian Jews were probably not super happy about this.
795-796 – Nothing of note seems to have happened to any significant Jewish population. Some Vikings did invade Ireland though. Not sure of any significant Jewish population in Ireland at the time.
842-843 – Nothing of note seems to have happened to any significant Jewish population. There was a big fire in China, and the Saracens on Crete kicked the crap out of a Byzantine army though. Might have been some Jews on Crete? Maybe there were some Byzantine Jews getting stomped by the Saracens?
860-861 – Nothing of note seems to have happened to any significant Jewish population. Some Proto-Russians laid seige to Constantinople though. I’m sure some Jews were affected.
This is an example of cherry picking your data. The reason the fear mongers only went back five hundred years, is because the previous 1500 years had nothing of any note happen to any significant Jewish population on years with lunar tetrads on their holy days. There were a lot of times between 1 A.D. and 1492 that Jewish populations got royally screwed, just with no astrological signs matching up. Yeah, 70 A.D., not a good year, no lunar tetrad, at least not on the dates required though. So you just ignore all the times nothing happened, even though there were more tetrads before 1493 where nothing happened than after.
Since you know most people listening to you and buying your book won’t even look this up you just say, “This has happened several times in the last five hundred years and every time it’s coincided with something terrible happening to the Jews.” As if five centuries is a terribly long time in the grand scheme of things.
But, The Tetrads Have Occurred on these Holidays Three Times in the Last Hundred Years! This must mean something!
This is just sheer coincidence. How many times before 1 A.D. did this happen? Probably a lot. It’s utterly predictable. Complex but predictable. It seems like it will happen again in 2033 and 2061 if I’m reading things correctly. After this it will lengthen out and the tetrads will only match up with the holidays every several hundred years or so.
It’s cyclical. Like just about everything else in astronomy.
So Is the World Going to End Or Not?
These same people have had a different world ending scenario every few years since basically forever. Go look at their track record. There’s no reason to think so. Its the problem with these prophecy things, they never work out. I assume the world will end one day or something bad will happen at some point, and one of these guys will have made some prediction and say, “Look, see! I was right! My asteroid flyby in 2019 was totally predicted by some obscure Bulgarian prophet and the Bible. World’s gonna end!”
Reality is for every time they throw something at the wall and something sort of sticks, there’s a thousand things that don’t. But hey, they’ll sell a ton of books and make money in the process. So I will reveal the formula on how to do this so you too can get rich off of end of the world scenarios.
Formula For Writing a Best Selling Doomsday Book
Step 1 – Pick a religion. Christianity is good because there’s a built in doomsday scenario. It doesn’t have to be Christianity, any religion with an apocalyptic scenario will work. Having over 1/3 of the world’s population as members gives you a good customer base.
Step 2 – Research it well enough to be considered an expert. Maybe go get yourself one of those doctorates in metaphysics or something.
Step 3 – Pick some world event or something and tie it in with your religion’s holy scripture. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make any sense at all. Most people in the religion haven’t read the scripture so they won’t know any better, and most prophetic texts are fairly vague and you can find a translation that will work. Heck you can use multiple translations of said texts to make it work. It can actually be something described in a completely different religion that you tie back into your picked religion. If you do that, you can make stuff up because how many Southern Baptists in Tennessee have even read the Bhagavad Ghita right?
Step 4 – Write a book on it, self publish on Amazon and market the crap out of it. Alternatively there are dozens of religious publishing houses that will gladly publish your work for you, it’s easy.
Step 5 – Pick every kind of pop culture thing that happens, write a blog article about it and tie it into your book. Use social media, religious radio shows, new media, whatever. Also a good reason to pick Christianity because there’s someone out there who will agree with you 100% with a listener base that will read what you’re writing.
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