Jonathan Cahn - The Harbinger Companion with Study Guide

This was foretold at Sinai, when the ordinance of the Shemitah was given:

Your land shall be desolate and your cities waste. Then the land shall enjoy its sabbaths as long as it lies desolate and you are in your enemies’ land. . . . As long as it lies desolate it shall rest—for the time it did not rest on your sabbaths when you dwelt in it.

—LEVITICUS 26:33–35

Centuries after Sinai, when Babylon’s armies captured the land and took the people into captivity, this would be fulfilled. The exile lasted seventy years, representing the number of Sabbath years not kept:

And those who escaped from the sword [King Nebuchadnezzar] carried away to Babylon . . . to fulfill the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths. As long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years.

—2 CHRONICLES 36:20–21

The American Shemitah

The law of the Shemitah was given to Israel. America was never under obligation to observe a Sabbath year. But the Shemitah remains a biblical sign of judgment on a nation that has driven God out of its life and replaced Him with idols and the ceaseless pursuit of gain. Thus, it is the Shemitah as a biblical sign of national judgment in the context of the warning of America that now concerns us.

Behind the crash of Wall Street and the collapse of the American economy lies the mystery of the Shemitah.

In 2008 the collapse of Lehman Brothers and America’s economy took place over the course of a week, the anniversary week of 9/11. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapsed on September 7 of that year. Two days later Lehman Brothers began its fall, and on September 11, 2008, the stock market took a precipitous plunge.

Exactly seven years separated the two events, the precise biblical period of time that concerns the Shemitah. The economic collapse, from housing to finance, concerned a forced wiping away of the nation’s financial accounts—the outward form of the Shemitah. In the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government relieved them of debts exceeding $5 trillion. In the case of Lehman Brothers, its bankruptcy wiped away its debts and canceled its loans.

All of these events helped trigger a stock market crash, touching the whole world and wiping out all gains over the preceding seven years and then some. The 2008 global economic collapse was one colossal Shemitah, made up of countless smaller ones.

The Great Collapse

On September 29, 2008, after a proposed economic and financial bailout failed to pass Congress, stocks plunged by more than 700 points. As one market analyst said:

It was this event more than anything else that shattered market confidence. Over the next two weeks, the Dow fell close to 2700 points, a decline of almost 25 percent . . . the damage had been done. 1

The greatest collapse of the 2008 economic implosion and the greatest stock market crash in American history happened on September 29, 2008. That day on the biblical calendar was the twenty-ninth day of Elul, the final, crowning day of the Hebrew Shemitah—and the exact day appointed by God for the wiping away of a nation’s financial accounts.

The Shemitah revolves around the number seven. So the number seven arises over and over again concerning the economic collapse of 2008. The great collapse happened on the crowning day of the seventh year. It was triggered on Capitol Hill when Congress rejected a $700 billion bailout plan. Seven percent of the market was wiped out. And the number of points wiped away was 777. 2

In order to trigger all of these “sevens,” all of Wall Street, the American and world economies, every economic and financial transaction, had to be an exact position for it all to happen as it did, at the exact time and to that exact number. No human hand could have orchestrated it.

In the years preceding America’s equivalent of the Shemitah year of 2008, the nation enjoyed a boom touching every area, from finance to the stock market to housing. But as America moved closer to that final year, danger signs began to surface, as loan failures and housing foreclosures rose.

Tishri 1: The Opening Day

But the first concrete sign of what was to come took place a year before the global economic collapse. In September 2007, Northern Rock, Britain’s fifth largest mortgage lender, collapsed. It was the first British institution to suffer a bank run in more than a century. By the end of the crisis, Northern Rock would be nationalized—a remission of debt, a first Shemitah.

Northern Rock’s fall happened on September 13, 2007, which on the biblical calendar is Tishri 1—the very day that opens up the Shemitah year. In other words, the first major sign of the Shemitah took place on the exact day on which the Shemitah begins. The fall of Northern Rock was linked to Lehman Brothers. It would be the fall of Lehman Brothers one year later that would trigger the collapse of the American economy.

From the day of Northern Rock’s fall to the day of the greatest stock market crash in history we have the exact start and finish to the biblical year of Shemitah.

Within that year, from September 2007 to September 2008, the year’s long climb of the stock market was reversed and the market began and then continued its fall. Many billions in stock market wealth were wiped out. Credit markets tightened, housing prices plunged, and foreclosures rose. As homeowners defaulted, the firms behind their mortgages absorbed cascading losses. This triggered more crises as lending institutions failed.

Each failure, each plunge, each bankruptcy constituted a wiping away of financial accounts, in outward form, a Shemitah, in this case a colossal Shemitah that overtook the world. And just as the biblical Shemitah touched the realms of labor, commerce, production, consumption, and trade—so did the economic implosion.

The Seven-Year Mystery

The Shemitah revolves around a seven-year cycle, and Elul 29 marks the end of that seven-year period. So what happens if we start from Elul 29, 2008, the date of the greatest collapse in Wall Street history, and go back seven Hebrew, biblical years?

It would bring us to Elul 29 of the year 2001. Did anything striking happen on that day? The answer is stunning. Elul 29 of 2001 was the day of the other greatest stock market crash in American history. Thus, on the biblical calendar, the two greatest stock market crashes in American history up to those days took place on the exact same Hebrew day, on the precise day appointed to touch a nation’s financial realm and wipe out its financial accounts, and exactly seven years apart to the biblical day and hours—just as ordained in the Bible.

The day of the Shemitah in 2001 was September 17, 2001. Since this move, along with subsequent actions in the military and security realms, led to the economic calamity in 2008 seven years later, it is accurate to say that what began on the day of the Shemitah was the Isaiah 9:10 Effect:

The attempt of a nation to defy the course of its judgment, apart from repentance, will, instead, set into motion a chain of events to bring about the very calamity it sought to avert.

While the twenty-ninth of Elul comes around once a year, there is only one Elul 29 that can close the seven-year cycle and constitute the final day of the cycle’s final year. Amazingly, the stock market crash of September 29, 2008, happened on precisely that one day in seven years that constitutes the biblical Shemitah. And as for the stock market collapse of 2001, it happened on the same one-in-seven-years biblical day.

In other words, America’s two greatest stock market crashes not only happened on the same day on the biblical calendar, but they also happened on the one day of the biblical year ordained to wipe away credit. And they happened not just seven years apart to the day, but also on the exact once-in-seven-years occurrence of that one Hebrew day.