If you’re into skygazing, you really should stay up late tonight (April 14, April 15) and watch the first of a series of four “blood” moons — a sequence of lunar eclipses called a tetrad that will occur over the next two years, and which some religious types believe signifies the beginning of the apocalypse. Mars is also incredibly close to Earth at the moment, making it one of the brightest objects in the sky. This alignment between the Sun, Earth, Mars, and the Moon has only occurred a handful of times in the last two thousand years, each time coinciding with a “hugely significant” religious event. For non-religious types, though, it’s just a great opportunity to see an amazing astronomical event that probably won’t happen again in your lifetime.And don't forget that Jupiter is very visible up there too, whatever that means. Besides this lunar and planetary alignment, a number of cosmic synchronicities suggest themselves. Various people (notably here) are pointing out that the Talmud (Sukkah 29a) says that a lunar eclipse is a bad omen for Israel and a blood moon is a sign of war. The relevant passage reads:
[...]
Our Rabbis taught, When the sun is in eclipse it is a bad omen for idolaters; when the moon is in eclipse, it is a bad omen for Israel,23 since Israel reckons by the moon25 and idolaters by the sun.26 If it27 is in eclipse in the east, it is a bad omen for those who dwell in the east; if in the west, it is a bad omen for those who dwell in the west; if in the midst of heaven it is bad omen for the whole world. If its face is red as blood, [it is a sign that] the sword is coming to the world; (Soncino Talmud)Let's hope those omens don't work out this time.
Another synchronicity is the eclipse of the moon during Passover. Granted, the synchronicity is mostly in my own head, in that the connection made me think of the famous citation of an ancient historian called Thallus by the fourth-century writer Sextus Julius Africanus as quoted by the ninth-century chronographer George Syncellus. Syncellus quotes Africanus, with reference to the darkness over the land at the time of the crucifixion of Jesus as reported in the Gospels, as follows: "Thallus calls this darkness an eclipse of the Sun in the third book of his Histories." Africanus adds that he thinks this is wrong and explains that a solar eclipse is impossible during Passover because the moon is full and on the opposite side of the earth from the sun.
But, of course, eclipses of the moon are okay, and here we just had one last night to remind us of that!
Quite a bit has been made of this reference to Thallus as potentially being the earliest external reference to the crucifixion of Jesus and the attendant darkness, but the relevant work of Africanus is lost apart from quotations and the work of Thallus is also lost, again apart from quotations, so whatever Thallus said (which is not quoted verbatim) is nested in two levels of missing context. It is quite unclear whether he said anything about Jesus or the crucifixion in his comment about an eclipse. In addition, we don't even know exactly when he lived, and the argument that he is a Samaritan Thallus who lived a generation after Jesus and was mentioned by Josephus is dodgy. First, Thallus was not an uncommon name and, second, Josephus doesn't actually mention a Samaritan Thallus. This is a debatable modern emendation of Josephus' text. So, alas, the notion of Thallus as a non-Jewish historian writing in the 50s C.E. who mentions Jesus and his crucifixion pretty much evaporates when one looks closely at the evidence.
