SUMMARY:
The Mystery of the Shemitah, which went to its second printing the day it was released, builds on the concepts and theories Jonathan Cahn first presented in The Harbinger, particular those in the chapter also titled "The Mystery of the Shemitah." The author's theory is that God has visited warnings and / or judgment against the United States according to a seven-year cycle going back many decades. While America is deserving of God's judgment and a call to repentance is definitely in order, this foundational premise of the book is biblically flawed from the outset. The Shemitah (Jewish Sabbath year) was an obligation given specifically and exclusively to the nation of Israel, and there is no biblical support whatsoever for the idea that God would either require the Shemitah year of any other nation or that He would impose a Shemitah-type judgment on a seven-year cycle on any nation, including even the nation of Israel itself.
Furthermore, none of the dozens and dozens of assertions and fact-claims in the book concerning economic trends, financial statistics and historical events are documented whatsoever, raising the question of where the author got his information, the accuracy of that information and why this most basic and necessary aspect of any research-based non-fiction book is completely missing. The burden of proof for such assertions and claims should never be on the reader if an author is to be taken seriously. In addition, the integrity of any publisher is rightly called into question when an author doesn't cite his sources.
The bottom-line is that, unfortunately. the significant problems that plague The Harbinger have possibly been exceeded in this book and so should give pause to anyone who takes the Word of God seriously.
_________
In this book, Jonathan Cahn builds on concepts he presented in The Harbinger, particularly those in the chapter titled The Mystery of the Shemitah in that book.
BACKGROUND:
In the Law of Moses, God required that his people, the Children of Israel, cease from their work on the seventh or Sabbath day of each week. During the time that they were in the wilderness, God provided a double-portion of manna on the 6th day each week, so that they would not have to work on the Sabbath, even if it only meant gathering food for that day.
In addition to the Sabbath day, the Lord also instructed them to observe a Sabbath year, during which the Israelites were to allow the land to rest from planting and harvesting. And not only was it an agrarian cycle, but it was also an economic cycle as lenders were required to forgive or "release" (the meaning of Shemitah) borrowers from the obligation of repaying their debts. In order to prevent the collapse of Israel's economy and to provide for their need for food during the entire seventh year, God actually tripled the harvest in the sixth year to carry them through.
However, over time, as the Israelite men disobeyed the Law concerning marrying wives from the other nations where idolatry and the worship of false gods was practiced, these foreign wives brought their idolatrous practices and pagan worship into the nation of Israel. The result was that the worship of the one true God was abandoned and the Law of Moses was largely ignored. Consequently, Israel failed to observe the Sabbath year for 70 cycles - meaning a period of 490 years.
In judgment against this pervasive sin, God used the merciless Babylonian empire as His agent of bringing judgment upon Israel because they had turned from Him. Furthermore, the Babylonians carried most of the nation of Israel into captivity - a captivity which lasted for 70 years - one year for each cycle of seven years that the nation had forsaken the Shemitah or Sabbath year. Thus through this God-imposed Shemitah, with the Israelites in captivity, this allowed the land of Israel to rest for the same number of years that the Israelites had failed to allow the land to rest voluntarily.
EVALUATION:
The premise of The Mystery of the Shemitah is that not only does the Shemitah explicitly and exclusively involve the nation of Israel, but that the "mystery of the Shemitah" is such that it is woven into the very fabric of history and the order of the creation and therefore can and does affect other nations and even the world through various calamities, including natural disasters, wars and financial crises - just as happened to Israel.
As such, Jonathan Cahn claims that God continues to follow the same seven-year cycle, based on the Hebrew calendar, and that just as He imposed a Shemitah upon Israel as a judgment of 70 years of captivity in Babylon because they turned from God, He will also impose a Shemitah upon any nation that turns from Him and when this happens that nation will suffer an economic crash and other cataclysmic events.
Just as in The Harbinger, Cahn claims that America has experienced just such calamities over the last many decades, with the most recent cluster beginning with the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001. Furthermore, he claims that the mystery of the Shemitah has been working in conjunction with what he calls the Isaiah 9:10 Effect, and manifested itself with the precipitous fall in the stock market on the last day of the Hebrew month of Elul in both 2001 and 2008 - which, admittedly are exactly 7 years apart on the Hebrew calendar.
In addition, the author goes back in American history many decades and tries to demonstrate that the mystery of the Shemitah has been at work and that many financial crises have happened in at least roughly the time-frame of a number of these Sabbath years.
However, before one gets too excited or becomes too convinced that "Cahn has done it again" (as some have put it), a number of things need to be considered.
Among the many problems with both The Harbinger and the Shemitah, the three that immediately come to the reader's attention are 1) Cahn mistakenly identifies the Shemitah as a universal principle that can affect any and all nations, 2) he wrongly identifies America as being a parallel to the nation of Israel in that he says it is a nation once dedicated to God and his purposes, but which has turned from God and is therefore subject to the "mystery of the Shemitah," and 3) one of the most egregious errors for a work of non-fiction, Cahn bombards the reader with a deluge of assertions and claimed facts concerning financial and economic trends, building programs, and calamitous events which he connects to the Shemitah - but does so without any footnotes or any citations of source material whatsoever.
1. There is not the slightest biblical support - and not even a hint that God expects or will impose a Shemitah upon any nation but Israel. There are no commands nor are there any examples whatsoever in the Scriptures that this is some sort of universal principle woven into the fabric of the Creation. Beyond this, in an appearance on the Jim Bakker show in August, Jonathan Cahn stated that when he was writing The Mystery of the Shemitah, "the revelations just came" to him from God, placing him in the position of essentially claiming to receive new revelation from God such that he is functioning as a prophet (my words, not his). This is significant because he is claiming to have discovered and is now revealing a mystery that has been neither seen nor expounded before he started doing so.
2. Any objective evaluation of America's history will reveal that although God's name was invoked by the Founding Fathers at various points, even to the point of some seeing America as a new Israel, it is equally true that the paganism of Freemasonry is woven into the very foundation of America - and this is evident everywhere one looks in our nation's capital of Washington, D.C. - to the degree that in the dome of the Capitol building, George Washington is depicted as becoming deity as he is received into heaven.
3. Initial research indicates that the present Hebrew calendar may be off by 1 to 3 years from that of Moses' day. If further research reveals this to be true, then this basically undermines the basic premise of the entire book because that would mean that none of the events described by the author are actually connected to the biblical seventh year that was to be observed when the Law was given to Moses. However, this remains to be definitively determined.
4. The reason that God imposed a Shemitah judgment upon Israel was because they had failed to observe the Shemitah's / Sabbath years that He required of them. However, there is no biblical basis whatsoever to claim that God has imposed a Shemitah-type judgment upon any nation that was not obligated to keep a Shemitah in the first place. Therefore, whatever has happened to America cannot be linked in any biblical way to a Shemitah. Furthermore, Cahn's book seems to be arguing that God has imposed a Shemitah judgment upon America repeatedly in connection with the modern Hebrew reckoning of Sabbath years. This does not at all follow the ancient pattern that he tries to use as support for his unbiblical theory.
5. while The Harbinger was classified as a work of fiction, Jonathan Cahn stated in an interview with Brannon Howse in 2012 that The Harbinger was 90% fact and 10% fiction. One of the problems in The Harbinger is that very few of his assertions and fact-claims are documented - so a tremendous amount of primary research was needed to do fact-checking to any degree. And, as it turned out there were many problems, not the least of which was what amounted to a very selective use of historical facts and statistics in order to make his case, as I thoroughly documented in my book, The Harbinger: Fact or Fiction.
However, The Mystery of the Shemitah is not a work of fiction to any degree - it is non-fiction. Yet, as noted earlier, the author literally bombards the reader with dozens and dozens of assertions and fact-claims, all with absolutely no documentation of sources whatsoever. Unfortunately, because of the overwhelming success of The Harbinger, very few of his readers will ever take the time to do fact-checking themselves, although if The Harbinger is any indication, there are very possibly many problems in this book, as well.
6. The problem with all of the calculations for Sabbath years is that the rabbis do not agree, even in the Talmud, as to whether the Jubilee year was concurrent with the 7th Sabbath year - or subsequent to it. The difference between the two possibilities is the shemitah year being off by 2 years for every 100 years of history. Since no one knows when the Jubilee year is, when this is combined with the difference of opinion concerning the relationship to the Sabbath year, the bottom line is that no one knows when the Sabbath year is on God's calendar, no matter what it is according to man's reckoning.
Furthermore, there are questions concerning the suspension of the Jubilee year after the Assyrian invasion and concerning the possible suspension of the sabbath year during the Babylonian Captivity.
All of the relatively few biblical texts that might give some insight as to where certain events might have happened in relation to a sabbath year are ambiguous and the various interpretations are disputed.
7. How it is that God has not been imposing Shemitah judgments upon Israel and the Jewish people, who are obligated in the Mosaic Law to observe the Shemitah year, while at the same time, he has been imposing various Shemitah judgments upon America over the last 100 years or so, when our nation does not have any obligation to observe the Shemitah years (as rightly affirmed by Jonathan Cahn).
I am presently very carefully going through The Mystery of the Shemitah a second time and annotating all the places where such assertions are made and will be researching the fact claims in the book. As I was reading it the first time, I just randomly checked a couple of the "facts" that seemed rather suspect to me, and sure enough, my initial research indicated that both were factual errors. However, before I come to a final conclusion on these and others, I'm going to delve into this further because I want to provide an honest evaluation and give the benefit of the doubt where possible.
Unfortunately, The Mystery of the Shemitah, may be an even more fragile house of cards than The Harbinger was from a biblical and historical perspective.
Having said all this, I still commend Jonathan Cahn for his passion to call out Americans for terrible sins which so radically plague this country - and issuing a challenge to Americans to repent before it is too late. America and Americans are more than deserving of God's severe judgment and that judgment might well be underway. And, if Jonathan Cahn's message has gotten the attention of some, such that they have either trusted in Christ for salvation or have turned away from a life of sin, then I rejoice greatly for every one it has impacted in this way.
At the same time, God is not limited in any way, and He can use anything and anyone to accomplish His will - including books and messages that fall short of being biblical and accurate. However, when books and messages are not thoroughly biblical and not completely accurate, they can also cause a great deal of harm in the long run. This is my great concern - that both believers and unbelievers are ultimately going to be led astray, confused and disillusioned by sensationalist-type books such as The Harbinger and The Mystery of the Shemitah.
Just as an FYI: For those who might be interested in a more in-depth treatment of the Shemitah theory as presented in Jonathan Cahn's first book, you may want to consider my book: The Harbinger: Fact or Fiction? - available here in Kindle and Paperback versions.
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Awesome book and an easy read. I would recommend this book to anyone who is concerned about our country and what is happening.
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Be very careful: No biblical support for the basic premise and no documentation for most assertions & fact-claims
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M. M. Bennett
Some Serious Problems.
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Excellent must read
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Did our great war time leader Winston Churchill not make a most ...
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The Mystery of the Shemiter - a must read!
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