The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood
before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
Joel 2:31
There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars.
On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity
at the roaring and tossing of the sea.
Luke 21:25
Our sun, moon, and stars are irreplaceable. And what happens to them is important. At the beginning of Genesis, God made it clear that He put the lights in the sky “as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years” (1:14). The Jews marked their calendar by the moon; today, our calendar is based on the sun.
Over the last few years there has been growing interest in what are being dramatically called “blood moons”. These are total lunar eclipses that appear red or rusty due to the earth’s atmosphere as our planet passes between the sun and moon. Without our atmosphere playing a role, the moon would just look dark.
NASA has a complete listing of solar and lunar eclipses for thousands of years. Total lunar eclipses are fairly common. Full moons on Jewish feast days are also normal because the Jewish calendar is lunar based. What is abnormal is having a series of four consecutive total lunar eclipses with no partial eclipses in between. This is being called a tetrad. Tetrads have happened only 62 times in the last 2,000 years.
What is even more rare is a tetrad on the first (Passover) and last (Sukkot or Tabernacles) Jewish feast days in two consecutive years, with each separated by six full moons (months). The fourth and final blood moon in the current tetrad will appear this coming week, from Sunday night into early Monday morning (Sept. 27th-28th). This has happened only eight times in the last 2,000 years. More recently, in the last five hundred years they have occurred in 1493-94, 1948-49, 1967-68, and 2014-15. A tetrad of this kind will not occur again for almost six hundred years.
I’m not going to get into naming names as to which speakers, prophecy teachers, preachers, etc., are promoting the blood moons. You can research that on your own. The verses most often quoted in reference to blood moons are Joel 2:31 shown above (and later mentioned in Acts 2:20) and Revelation 6:12. It is debatable whether these verses are tied to periods when the moon looks red during rare tetrads.
In short though, various teachers have tied the dates of these tetrads to major moments in Jewish history – events that were positive, negative, or both. There is compelling evidence that events affecting Jews and Israel happen around the times of these eclipses, but never exactly on them. I believe we need to avoid the temptation of being too dogmatic about the issue.
As I close this post, let’s look at those dates again in regards to Jewish history:
- 1493-94: Jews expelled from Spain
- 1948-49: Israel becomes a nation
- 1967-68: Jerusalem recaptured
- 2014-15: ?????
My bottom line: In my humble opinion, there is an undeniable connection between “blood moon” tetrads and the Jewish people. What it means exactly for the current tetrad, time will shortly tell.