By Walid Shoebat
Jonathan Cahn is a Messianic Jew who came up with a fanciful theory that America was punished on Sabbatical years and will receive more judgments to come if it refuses to repent. One Christian university professor, Dr. Adrian Zenz, from Korntal Germany took Cahn on his challenge and tested Cahn’s sabbatical year theory (Shemitah). The expert analysis had one striking (out of many) damning conclusions: if we accept Cahn’s Shemitah (Sabbath) theory by using the stock market data we would have the God of the Bible supporting the Nazis and judging America for destroying Hitler after World War II.
The study looking at the Shemitah year which occurs at the end of a 7-year cycle’s economic downturns to see if it is true that, according to Cahn, a nation is under judgment for having disregarded God. As it turns out, the wider claim of Shemitah cycles in past history cannot be substantiated by the facts.
The Shemitah cycle claims that for the past 100 or 50 years are not upheld by the data. Cahn seemed so use the 2001/08 timings that he sought to claim Shemitah effects into economic history.
But the facts from the research actually proved the opposite of Cahn’s claims. Regarding Cahn’s Shemita factor in most cases, God would seem to have punished the U.S. when they were heroic as the study concluded:
“Shemitah mechanism of economic judgment seems very problematic, since God effectively used the US to free Europe from the power of Nazism.”
Yet America was punished instead.
Zenz was not kidding.
He had reached out to Shoebat.com with the analysis, a Christian Lecturer on Empirical Research Methods and a PhD supervisor from Germany he understands his nation’s past history with Nazism, and now he warns that Cahn’s theory:
“makes you see how deceptive Cahn’s book is: selectively pushing confirming facts, and deliberately omitting a whole host of disconfirming facts.”
Hard to believe? Examine the full analysis for yourself (see 20 page analysis results here). Its methodical, its detailed, and it leaves no room to maneuver for any con-artist.
In other words, if one takes the Shemitah argument, the United States was punished right after it destroyed Hitler who killed six million Jews.
Zenz then destroys the theory piece by piece. As the report concluded that the trends in the market acted normally and had no connection to curses or blessings:
“higher growth during non-Shemitah years was at times influenced by special factors such as World War II, during which GDP growth was unusually high due to government spending on the war. After the war, this spending declined, creating an artificial recession.”
“in 1973, economic growth was very strong despite it being a Shemitah year, and despite the legalization of abortion.”
To gain a true sense of “blessings” vs. “curses”, again, an average GDP needed to be considered and not just looking at charts. So Zenz then studied the change of Shemitah with non-Shemitah periods and a statistical test was conducted. The Statistical Analysis of Shemitah-related GDP changes Using Quarterly Data from 1947-2015 proved disastrous to Cahn’s theory.
Here, a Shemitah period was defined as ranging from the fourth quarter of the first year to the fourth quarter of the subsequent year, e.g. Q4 2000 to Q4 2001. By including five quarters, the so-called “wake” of the Shemitah (i.e. the month of Tishri) was included as per Cahn’s statement that the month of Tishri will reveal the full economic impact of the Shemitah. This is because the key point of remittance is Elul 29, the last day of the Shemitah. Consequently, Cahn argues that the quarter following the Shemitah should reflect the peak of the economic downturn caused by the Shemitah.
He noted that besides the fourth quarter of 2008 “the “wake” of the Shemitahs (the final fourth quarter which includes the month of Tishri) has often witnessed strongly positive GDP growth” (see red lines on chart) and “that several of the strongest negative quarters were entirely outside a Shemitah time period.(see blue lines on chart)”
Even Cahn’s claim “that the 4th quarters following a Shemitah, which according to Cahn are supposed to reflect the strongest time of economic downturns, have mostly seen the complete opposite: a positive growth.
The research adds:
“in four of the five cases, negative changes in third quarters were compensated by strongly positive growth in the subsequent fourth quarters, which would directly contradict Cahn’s assertions about the significance of Tishri and the wake of the Shemitah.”
Even Cahn’s the 1980-1981 “Shemitah recession” year where Cahn argues that this is an example of the Shemitah causing an economic turning point, since the data after all reflects a strong negative growth around the middle of the Shemitah year, yet the GDP (Gross National Product) debunks Cahn’s theory:
However, the final two quarters of the Shemitah (its end and its wake), which are supposed to be the key time of economic “remittance” or depression, reflect a very powerful economic recovery: from 7.9 percent negative to 7.6 percent positive growth. The quarter after the Shemitah’s wake, which includes the month of Tishri, again shows very strong and even higher growth (8.5 percent). Only the second quarter of 1980, which was nearly a year after the end of the Shemitah year, marks the beginning of another downturn. This again shows how imperfect the fit between Shemitah years and actual economic developments is.
And even before that, in the second half of 1973, during the oil-crisis which Cahn used as evidence, a fairly significant stock market loss was accompanied by slight GDP growth:
A similar issue can be demonstrated for the Shemitah cycle culminating in the 1973/74 oil crisis. Cahn argues that during the Shemitah, stocks fell significantly. To quote: “Four months after the Shemitah’s beginning, the stock market began to collapse.”; and: “By its (the oil crisis’) end, 45 percent of the market had been wiped out.” (both quotes from p.82).
However, the chart below shows how problematic and potentially misleading these statements are when used to support the Shemitah hypothesis. Firstly, the largest stock decline during the 1966-73 Shemitah cycle actually occurred between May 1969 and May 1970, when the DJIA fell below 650 points, its lowest level since the end of 1962 (the lowest point during the 1972-3 Shemitah was just below 860 points). Secondly, the decisive time period of Elul-Tishri in 1973 actually proved to be a powerful season of recovery for the DJIA, allowing it to regain a large share of the losses incurred during the 1972-3 Shemitah period. At the end of the 1973 Elul-Shemitah phase, the DJIA stood at over 950 points, about 25 percent higher than at the beginning of the 7-year cycle in August 1966. This cannot count as a wiping out of national financial accounts.
Even the second half of 1987, for example, there was a major stock market downturn, but this is meaningless since the U.S. GDP grew by over 10 percent!
So taking a chart without examining the full data, slapping all that in a book, is not only unprofessional, but deceptive.
Again, looking at stock charts is not enough. When analyzing US real GDP (Gross National Product) changes (annual and quarterly) the analysis proved beyond any doubt against Cahn’s hypothesis.
Cahn strongly advocated the spiritual significance of the end of the Shemitah and the subsequent month of Tishri as a time of national repentance. Also, Scripture commanded the remittance of debt to occur specifically at the end of the Shemitah, but as it turns out, the professional study concluded that:
“it is remarkably that the average GDP change even during the two quarters around the end of the Shemitah was in fact positive, and not negative“.
In one of its conclusions the study shows:
Overall, the comprehensive descriptive and inferential statistical tests based on real GDP change in the U.S. cannot support Cahn’s hypothesis that Shemitah years or their final phases or wakes systematically cause economic downturns.
The problem with such books is that most do not examine to see if the proper experts are included. Theological books, especially in today’s markets, are many times void of expert analysis, where the author becomes everything: historian, mathematician and even an economical analyst.
The story of Cahn is the story of a magician who knew he was dealing with unexperienced sheep.
Even when using the second part of the analysis, which examines daily Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) stock market index values over an entire period of 125 years (1889-2014). Cahn’s own methodology of connecting Shemitah or Tishri periods to stock market changes as the analysis concluded is “rather fuzzy”. Cahn had made an outlandish method to prove his theory. Cahn in his book asks:
“How many of the ten greatest point crashes in Wall Street history are connected either to the biblical month of Tishri or the biblical Year of the Shemitah? 70 percent!” (p.115)
The unexperienced reader goes “wow,” but such a proposal is a complete trick.
In other words, if one wants to see the proof in Cahn’s pudding, the data that Cahn needed to use is only ‘the month of Tishri in a Shemitah year’ and not ‘The month of Tishri or the biblical Shemitah year. This “or” makes a monumental difference. The analysis easily discovered the trick:
In this statement, he includes not only Shemitah years, but also the month of Tishri in every single year. But this approach is inconsistent with the scriptural approach that the remittance is to occur at the end of Shemitah years, and unsuitable to prove Cahn’s Shemitah hypothesis of Sabbath years causing economic downturns.
Many argue that what Cahn did was not intentional. However, such trickery is still continuing. After realizing that the deadline is near two days before September 13th when Cahn knew that the stock market was closed, Cahn asked his followers to be on the lookout for September the 11th.
It was no problem for Cahn to pull a fast one. Anyone can search the headline and claim something was a fulfillment. So before the end of the Shemitah year, Cahn switched the theory, and instead of judgments on America, he concluded that these judgments are now on Mecca in Arabia.
The proof of such deception was carried out by one of his favorite publishers, World Net Daily (sorry Joseph friendships has limits). Speaking to World Net Daily, Cahn said some of the most outlandish things:
He told WND that he noticed two signs in the final days of the current Shemitah – one involving the collapse of a structure in Saudi Arabia on Sept. 11 and the other a rainbow in New York City.
“Very strange. In the last days of the Shemitah, two striking signs. A storm causes destruction on Islam’s central mosque in Mecca (on Sept. 11). At the same time a rainbow appears (Sept. 10) over the tower at Ground Zero,” he said. “Many immediately took this as a good sign. Yet, it was not long ago that America desecrated the sign of the rainbow by using a vessel of God to celebrate the Supreme Court’s striking down the biblical definition of marriage.”
So now God struck the U.S. with Noah’s promise never to flood the earth, yet to Cahn God’s word is obsolete, and the warning of the rainbow is over the homosexual agenda?
The curses seem to switch from the U.S. to Mecca. Isn’t this what we at Shoebat.com argued for years from Scripture?
And then came the attacks on Shoebat.com with a hundred comments or so from his cultic supporters saying “how dare you” and “you’r not saved” and “you’r jealous”.
It is as someone who sends comments to a police officer telling him he’s being “jealous” of the drug dealer and is why the officer arrested him.
Indeed, this is a dangerous and demonic movement, that if one follows this Jewish Sabbatical calendar set by Cahn, then God would have blessed Hitler’s Nazi Germany after World War II instead of the United States. If one insists on mixing calendars by using the Jewish calendar, Jesus ends up not being Messiah and if one insists on using the Hebrew Codex instead of the Greek Septuagint, they undermine crucial facts of the Gospel.
To see the 20 page detailed analysis report, read An Empirical Statistical and Exegetical Evaluation of the Shemitah Effect Suggested by Jonathan Cahn – Dr. Adrian Zenz”