China’s Alphabet May Have References To Noah And The Flood
Posted on October 16th, 2004 by Anthony K. Valley
A connection between the Chinese Alphabet and Biblical History? Perhaps…
Some of the evidence supporting the divine authorship of scripture can be found within scripture itself. And this only makes sense, because if the Creator of the universe chose to reveal His will in writing, clearly He could do so in such a way that we could verify its origin. But the internal evidence is not the only kind available to us. There is also external evidence based upon various phenomena we can observe, as well as information provided by various disciplines of science and history. This month, we will consider an example of external evidence which comes from a seemingly unlikely source: the Chinese written language.
Unlike our alphabet, which is a series of characters representing certain sounds, the ancient Chinese “alphabet” consists of characters which represent things or ideas: i.e., words. These characters are combined in various ways to make additional words. When a Chinese person reads a word so constructed, he does not read it as the sum of its parts, but rather as a distinct word. For example, consider the word for west />
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Noah had three sons (Genesis 6:10). So, Noah and his wife and his sons and his daughters-in-law add up to eight mouths or persons. The biblical account of the flood describes the ark as a large boat which carried eight persons, and the Chinese character for “large boat” is a boat with eight persons.
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p(small). Source: Watchman Magazine © 2004 Watchman Magazine
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Rather than “proving” the literalness of the Bible, this more likely merely confirms that there are hundreds of different Flood myths from around the world largely focused on the events around the Black Sea. The Bible version of the myth is just one of many versions. Discovering some ‘clues’ in the characters of Chinese writing doesn’t prove the Bible. It suggests that the Chinese had myths similar to the Jews. It’s still fascinating to see all the links and connections, but we have to be careful not to get carried away in trying to “prove” the Bible is anything more than what it is: a collection of writings of people trying to express their own understanding of the workings of the Universe, in the context of their own times and customs and learnings, including the myths they had heard from previous cultures, as well as adapting/adopting much of the Code of Hammurabi into the Mosaic Law.
It could also prove that there was a global flood that all later histories recorded.
I agree that this does not “prove” the validity of the bible, but it may support the idea of a global flood.
It’s unmitigated crap. The current character for boat dates from medieval times—the ancient character is a completely different character (they used the left-hand radical, representing a dugout canoe, not an ark). The sound of the character is a loan-word for rudder, and the character refers to boats that have rudders. The “8” radical and the “mouth” radical are worn-down forms of other radicals and the modern use of 8 and mouth to represent them is strictly a modern development. In short, this claim is nonsense.
Michael
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