by Mike Gray

Here’s an interesting idea that may be true, or could be based on defective scholarship:

There is a genuine kinship between a good detective story and this volume [The Discovery of Genesis: How the Truths of Genesis Were Found Hidden in the Chinese Language] by The Reverend C. H. Kang and Dr. Ethel R. Nelson. The authors start with the observance of some astonishing points of correspondence between certain characters in the Chinese language and elements of the Genesis account of man’s early beginnings. They go on to analyze dozens of the ideographic pictures that make up words in the Chinese language. The evidence they compile is marshaled to support the thesis that the ancient picture writing of the Chinese language embodies memories of man’s earliest days. The characters when broken down into component parts time and again reflect elements of the story of God and man recorded in the early chapters of Genesis. Man and Woman, the garden, the institution of marriage, the temptation and fall, death, Noah’s flood, the tower of Babel—they are all there in the tiny drawings and strokes that make up the Chinese characters.

Some of these characters have been reproduced on-line:

The Chinese character for “to covet” has the woman symbol combined with two trees. The Chinese character for a boat combines vessel with person and the number 8. There were 8 persons in Noah’s ark.

This sounds wonderful, but it isn’t without its critics:

… Dr. Ethel Nelson, the chief author of that work, has stated that the book was “not accurate” and that she “dissuade(s) readers from referring to it.”

Over the past several years, Dr. Nelson, along with various collaborators, has continued to take a basically flawed approach to the study of the origin of Chinese characters, treating most as relatively complex semantic composites. For those who have read any of those later works and been tempted to believe the stories presented in them, I suggest two scholarly books, written by professionals in the fields of Chinese language and linguistics.

There are more comments and criticisms of The Discovery of Genesis on the Web.

This is one I’ll have to leave to the experts.