| To answer that, we have to first look at some of the interesting history of eclipses.
Genesis 1:14 records: “And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for ;signs and for ;seasons.”
The Hebrew word for “signs” is “oth” which means “warning.”
Let’s examine this.
The Earth revolves around the Sun, and the Moon revolves around the Earth.
Sometimes, the Earth is between the Sun and the Moon, and the shadow of the Earth passes over the Moon, first appearing red, sometimes called a “blood moon,” before completely blacking it out.
This is called a lunar eclipse and occurs around every six months.
Other times, the Moon’s orbit passes between the Sun and the Earth, and the Moon’s shadow blocks out the Sun.
This is called a solar eclipse, and also occurs around every six months.
Where a lunar eclipse is visible at night from anywhere on the entire Earth, a solar eclipse is visible during the day, but only in a narrow path, 60 to 120 miles wide, stretching across a particular 8,000-mile-long swath of the Earth’s surface, taking only 3 to 5 minutes to pass over any specific spot.
Therefore, viewing a solar eclipse is much rarer than viewing a lunar eclipse.
Just as lunar eclipses occur in predictable cycles, solar eclipses occur in a predictable series of overlapping 18-year cycles, called saros cycles.
This was first discovered by Babylonian astronomers in Mesopotamia some 2,500 years ago.
Since eclipses are visible across many civilizations, such as China, Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Rome, they provide an accurate way of correlating events on ancient calendars.
One question about solar eclipses is, how can the Sun, which is so large, be blocked out by the Moon, which is so small.
The Sun is 400 times larger than the Moon, but it also 400 times further away from the Earth.
This results in the coincidence that, from the Earth’s perspective, the Sun and the Moon appear the same size in the sky, allowing the Moon to block out the Sun.
In some solar eclipses, the Moon blocks out the entire circumference of the Sun but the rim is still visible in a thin, fiery ring of light. This is called the corona.
Viewing the corona, one can observe solar flares shooting up from the Sun’s surface, sometimes more and sometimes less.
This is because every 11 years, the Sun’s magnetic field flips, affecting the amount of solar activity.
During the solar eclipse of 2017, solar flare activity was less because the Sun’s magnetic field as at what is called “solar minimum.”
The 2024 eclipse is during a “solar maximum,” so more solar flare activity is visible in the corona.
Most lunar and solar eclipses occur with no apparent correlation to events on Earth, such as July 5, 1777, Captain Cook’s crew observed a solar eclipse from Tonga; or May 29, 1919, a solar eclipse confirmed Einstein’s prediction that light from a distant star would appear to bend due to gravitational forces, verifying his theory of general relativity.
Other eclipses have been considered foreboding and ominous signs.
William Shakespeare wrote in King Lear, “These late eclipses of the sun and moon portend no good to us.”
One of these was during the reign of Israel’s King Jeroboam II, 793-753 BC.
The Prophet Amos prophesied that an eclipse would occur: “And it shall come to pass in that day,” says the Lord GOD, “That I will make the sun go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in broad daylight.”
At the time of Amos, the Prophet Jonah was sent to the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, the largest city in the world.
Nineveh was a sinful place. It had a temple to the pagan goddess, Ishtar, with female prostitutes, as well as male prostitutes dressed as females, together with infant sacrifice.
At the time of Jonah’s preaching, the solar eclipse prophesied by Amos took place, June 15, 763 BC.
Since Assyrians viewed eclipses as signs of imminent judgement, this may have contributed to Nineveh repenting.
The Assyrian Empire was spared judgement for another century.
A solar eclipse, May 28, 585 B.C., near Greece, caused the Medes to stop fighting right in the middle of a battle with the Lydians. Not long after this, the Medes were conquered by Cyrus the Great of Persia.
The Greek historian Herodotus recorded a solar eclipse on October 2, 480 BC, when Xerxes departed from Persia on his fateful expedition against Greece. The Persian army had initial success, winning the Battle of Thermopylae, but it was eventually defeated by the Greeks, beginning the Persian Empire’s decline.
The Roman Empire experienced five solar eclipses between 447 AD and 464 AD, as Attila the Hun and Germanic barbarians flooded over the borders, till Rome finally fell in 476 AD.
Other Bible prophets mentioned eclipses associated with judgement:
The Book of the Prophet Joel, chapter 2, has the line: “The sun will be turned into darkness, And the moon into blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.”
Mark 13:24 states: “But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light.”
And the Apostle John recorded in Revelation 6:12 “He broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood.”
Another example of a solar eclipse being viewed as a foreboding sign was when King Henry I was saying goodbye to England to go on a military campaign in Normandy, when suddenly a solar eclipse occurred, August 2, 1133. The King never returned, as he died not long after, and England was thrown into chaos and civil war.
On August 8, 1496, an eclipse passed over the Aztec and Mayan empires. They interpreted this as a sign of doom. Within a generation, Spanish Conquistadors arrived, and 75 percent of the native population died from war and pestilence.
A 20th century coincidence was after the Titanic sank in the Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912. Just 60 hours later, an eclipse passed over the exact path the ship took.
On August 21, 1914, a solar eclipse divided Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia. At this very spot fighting started, beginning World War One.
On August 21, 1933, an eclipse passed over Jerusalem and Baghdad while Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in Germany, leading up to World War Two.
On July 9, 1945, the U.S. government established the White Sand’s Missile Range in New Mexico. That day a solar eclipse occurred, traveling from the U.S. to the U.S.S.R.
A week later, July 16, 1945, the U.S. detonated world’s first atomic bomb at White Sand’s, beginning the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
On February 26, 1979, a solar eclipse passed over Mount St. Helens. A little over a year later it erupted.
On July 31, 1981, a solar eclipse crossed over the entire U.S.S.R., touching no other nation. The U.S.S.R. began to decline until it collapsed a decade later.
On rare occasions, due to the Earth and Moon’s cyclical orbits, the shadow of two eclipses can cross the same place on the Earth within a period of seven years or less, which if plotted on a map would look like a giant X pattern.
How rare is this?
NASA Goddard programmer Ernest T. Wright mapped the paths of every total solar eclipse for the past 5,000 years, 11,898 of them, and found that for a total solar eclipse to cross the same place twice only happens once every 366 years.
The letter X in the ancient paleo-Hebrew alphabet is called the Tav. It is the last letter, indicating the end or judgement.
This adds to the speculation as to whether an eclipse is sign from God.
Since 1776, America has had only a few times when the paths of two eclipses crossed each other within a seven year period, forming an X.
One account was in the early 1800s.
On June 16, 1806, the path of a solar eclipse crossed the entire American continent, passing over an area where the Ohio River and the Mississippi River meet in southern Missouri and Illinois.
This area is called the New Madrid fault.
Then, less than seven years later, on September 17, 1811, the path of another solar eclipse crossed that same New Madrid spot, making a giant X in the middle of America.
Shortly after, that same New Madrid area experienced cataclysmic earthquakes with the ground shifting and geysers shooting water out of the ground.
The Mississippi River flowed backwards for a day and earthquake tremors were felt as far away as New York City, Boston, Montreal, and Washington D.C. President James and Dolley Madison felt them in the White House.
At the same time, there was another sign in the heavens, Chief Tecumseh’s Comet raced across the sky.
Indian Chief Tecumseh capitalized on this sign to raise a coalition of Indians to join the British in fighting Americans during the War of 1812.
Then there was another time when an X was created by the paths of two eclipses crossing, the first being February 12, 1831, the year of Nat Turner’s slave uprising.
This eclipse crossed Georgia and Tennessee.
Then, a little over three years later, November 30, 1834, another eclipse crossed like an X over that same area, between Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas and Oklahoma.
The X was on the exact path where the Indians tribes of Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek and Chickasaw were being forcibly removed by the Federal government to Oklahoma.
Then, exactly seven years, seven months and seven days from that first 1831 eclipse, there was another eclipse on March 25, 1838.
This was right before General Winfield Scott received his final “Orders No. 25,” May 17, 1838, to finish the job and remove the last remaining 15,000 Cherokee from Georgia.
It tragically took place during the harshest of winters, with freezing rain, sleet, and snow, in what became known as the Trail of Tears. 4,000 died.
This forced relocation by the Federal government was condemned by Christian missionaries, as well as by the famous Congressman from Tennessee, Davy Crockett.
French writer Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed the Trail of Tears and wrote in Democracy in America: “In the whole scene there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn’t watch without feeling one’s heart wrung.”
Recently, on August 21, 2017, just seven months after President Trump took office, a solar eclipse crossed over the entire United States from west to east, one of only three to do that.
The first was in 1806 and the second in 1918.
The path of the 2017 eclipse passed over seven cities named Salem which means peace.
Seven years later, which happens to be the first day of the Hebrew calendar year, another solar eclipse crosses the United States, April 8, 2024.
Its path crosses over or near seven cities named Nineveh, as well as a town named Jonah in Texas, and Wilmington, Kentucky, where The Ark Encounter is located.
The path of the 2017 eclipse and the 2024 eclipse both cross Carbondale, Illinois, at a place called “Little Egypt,” forming a giant X over the United States.
Similar to the 1811 eclipse, with Tecumseh’s Comet being visible, the 2024 eclipse will coincide with a comet being visible, known as the “devil comet,” which circles the Sun every 71 years.
To add to the anxiety, in April 2024 there will be trillions of cicadas, a plant-eating winged insect, sometimes called a locust, though there are differences.
Nymph cicadas live underground for years until their metamorphosis and they emerge above ground.
In middle America, there are two main groups, or broods, of cicadas.
One brood lives underground in a 13-year cycle and another in a 17-year cycle.
Every 221 years, the two cycles overlap.
The last time this happened was in 1803.
This year, beginning in April of 2024, both the 13-year and the 17-year broods of cicadas will emerge above ground at the same time, resulting in trillions of cicadas.
This all sounds so much like the Biblical judgements in Egypt.
Are eclipses just coincidences or are they signs from God?
Whether they are or are not, most people consider America to be on a path away from God.
We are all called to repent and turn back to the Lord.
Mark 1:14-15, declared: “After John was put in prison, Jesus went into Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God. ‘The time has come,’ he said ‘The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!’” |
