Introduction

The Chinese written language is among the oldest languages in the world — predating the Hebrew in which the Old Testament was written by 700 to 1,700 years. It began with a foundation of pictographic characters — characters that were miniature pictures of the things they represented. These were combined with others to form ideographic characters — words that convey a meaning derived from the combination of the individual meanings of the component characters.

The study of these characters is a great encouragement to the Christian. For hidden within them are explicit and detailed depictions of key elements of the Genesis account of creation. China had a long history as a monotheistic nation prior to Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and animism.

The characters in these studies are the traditional Chinese characters. Some years ago the Communist government sought to revise the characters into a “simplified” form. They did this for two reasons: (1) to make typesetting easier; and (2) to eliminate from their written language the built-in references to God. This material can be found in The Discovery of Genesis by C. H. Kang and Ethel R. Nelson.