It may be the most joyous of the Jewish feasts.....Purim. It probably gets a little more than joyous....toward wildly festive. Jews will dress up in costumes....and celebrate....ostensibly anyway....how the Jews were given one day by the Persian king to defend themselves against those who hated them. They will give gifts of food to each other and do charitable works and read together the book of Esther.
The holiday begins in Israel this Thursday....March 13....on the Gregorian calendar....(14 Adar on the Jewish calendar).....at sundown....which if that is about 6 PM there....then it would be about noon here in Western Pennsylvania....and the celebration would last until sundown the following day....March 14....or 15 Adar on the Jewish calendar. Of course Jewish people here will be using our sundown to sundown.
Are you familiar with the story from the book of Esther? Hopefully you are. The king gave Haman an edict to kill all the Jews on a certain day. Mordecai found out about it and persuaded Esther....the queen....who kept her Jewishness secret up until them....he persuaded Esther to go to the king in an attempt to save her people. This was a very dangerous request that Mordecai made....because you just didn't go into the king on your own. That's where that famous...."If I perish....I perish" comes into play.
Esther did go to the king who came to see that Haman was an evil man. He could not rescind his edict....so he gave the Jews that day to defend themselves.
It gets a little more complicated because most of those who hated the Jews were in the city of Shushan....and it would take more than one day for the Jews to defend themselves....so the king gave them two days....an additional day....in Shushan and other walled cities. In like manner today....in Jerusalem....a walled city....they celebrate a day later.....or our Friday March 14 to 15....and they call it....Shushan Purim....after the city Shushan.
Well that's the feast....that's the holiday....but it is harder to have a celebration in this time of war and uncertainty. Nonetheless....Purim....is only days away....and this year will fall on a....blood moon....the first blood moon since 2022.
Here is something interesting that you can research for yourself at space.com. This is mathematical of course....but all eclipses follow a pattern....they refer to it as a family of repititions....of which they gave the name....saros....which means....repetition. A....hypersaros....is a full 521 years for the mathematical equation to complete itself. This has been documented but....521 years ago....in 1504....Christopher Columbus....on his fourth voyage to the Americas....was stranded so to speak in Jamaica....and needed provisions. They knew at the time of these lunar eclipse charts....so Columbus told the natives that if they did not help then their God would turn the moon dark. The ruse served the purpose.
What this means is that Columbus would have been looking at the same pattern....and the same timing of the blood moon that we will see in a few days.....if the sky is clear. The optimal time for viewing should be from about 2:30 in the morning...to 3:30 in the morning.
Addendum: It's no secret for I have posted on it often. After forty years of study....doing the only thing that any of us can do....and that is prayerfully study God's Word in humility....constantly applying self-examination as to this....and doing the best that we can to understand and learn that which glorifies God....after forty years on this topic I believe that the Jewish feasts are in God's plan of end-times events....not to predict anything....but to take comfort in God's total authority over His own creation. And I believe that the moon and the sun and stars and various cosmic and celestial happenings can at any time be used by God as signs to us....in retrospect....just as happened in the Old Covenant....and the New....the Bethlehem star being being an example.
