Genesis in Ancient China: The Creation Story in China's Earliest Script

By Ginger Tong Chock

Excavated and deciphered less than a hundred years ago, China's 3500 year old written script held within it a group of pictographic characters that recorded the Creation story as told in the Book of Genesis.

Genesis in Ancient China: The Creation Story in China's Earliest Script, highlights 39 of these anc

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eastward Garden Publishing
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780989665421

Ginger Tong Chock

Ginger Tong Chock earned her PhD from Stanford University in Chinese History of Art, a field interlocked with China's heritage of calligraphy, literature and philosophy. An independent scholar and author, she presently resides in Honolulu.

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PREFACE

Did the Genesis Creation story actually reach China more than 3000 years ago? I was introduced to this subject of Genesis and China’s earliest script years ago through Dr. Ethel Nelson. Since then, a decade and more of investigative research to understand its true connection and possible ramifications in early Chinese thought, resulted in this book. Genesis in Ancient China presents new evidence that the original intent of several key oracle bone graphs of ca. 1200 B.C. Shang dynasty not only recorded the Genesis Creation story, but can also in their Genesis related content shed new light on specific significant historical legends, mythologies and early philosophical thought. The following chapters present the Genesis story, from Genesis 1:1 to 3:24, through forty telling oracle bone graphs whose constructed forms correlate with verses of the Creation narrative. In effect, God had not only recorded His name in ancient China, but He had also left His Creation story in Chinese history.

Introduction

IT WAS AN ORDINARY AFTERNOON in Beijing in 1899. Wang Yirong (1840-1900), a prominent scholar of antiquities and paleography, walked into a medicinal shop little realizing he was about to stumble upon one of China’s greatest historical discoveries. Glancing at the shopkeeper grinding up dragon bones for a medicine known to cure wounds, Wang noticed some strange markings etched on the bone surfaces. Curious, Wang took a closer look and immediately recognized the etchings to be an ancient form of script. These dragon bones, he soon learned, came from the vicinity of Anyang in Henan province. Village farmers, after working the fields, would dig them from the ground to sell to the herb shops. What Wang saw before him were the missing links to China’s earliest history.

Archaeological excavation finally commenced in 1928 at the site of Yinxu, northwest of Anyang, but was halted in 1937 by a wartorn China. When excavations resumed in 1949, they brought to light the rich remains of the Late Shang 商 dynasty, also called Yin 殷, ca. 1400 - 1050 B.C. This royal capital, re-located here by the Shang king Pan Geng, proved to be a great complex of large palaces, workshops, residences, temples, places of sacrifice, and cemeteries.

Most extraordinary were the royal tombs. The earliest were monumental in scale of up to twenty meters [65.6 feet] long, while dropping as deep as thirteen meters [42.65 feet] straight-edged into the ground. They contained the remains of hundreds of warriors, accompanying weaponry, officials, musicians, cooks, servants and slaves, caches of precious gold and jade, and exotic tributes from as far away as Siberia, Central Asia, India, the South Seas and Pacific.¹ Here also, were found the so-called dragon bones, which turned out to be the scapula bones of oxen and under-shells of turtles. Inscribed, these were the tangible evidence of the Shang royal divinations. They exceeded a hundred thousand in number. The Yinxu findings were significant in that they not only verified the historical fact of the Shang dynasty, ca. 1600 B.C. - 1050 B.C., but also uncovered the earliest dated script of the Chinese writing system still used today, establishing it as the longest living written language in the world.

The writings on turtle plastrons and oxen scapula were part of the royal ritual of divination associated with the Shang kings’ ancestral sacrifices. In this divination process, known as pyromancy, the prepared turtle shell or ox bone was heated by fire to produce stressed cracks, which were then interpreted by the royal diviners as the spirit’s yes or no reply to the king’s questions. After the divination was completed, the prognoses of the diviner’s questions and answers were recorded onto the shell and bone surface alongside the divined cracks. The topics addressed in the divinations were primarily about sacrifices, but also included the king’s personal and state matters, such as hunting and fishing, excursions, weather, military expeditions, crops, dreams, and even his toothache.

The questions were directed to the deceased ancestral kings of the Shang dynasty. These spirits were thought to possess some measure of spiritual power which if given the right sacrifices, could be motivated to assist their royal lineage reigning on earth. Ruling far above these ancestral spirits and any other spirits, was the one supreme God, whom the Shang people believed to be the Ruler of all heaven and earth. His name was Shang Di 上帝, literally, Lord Most High. Yet, of the thousands of sacrifices recorded in the oracle bone writings, only a few were offered directly to this supreme God. The reason, some scholars suggest, may have been because Shang Di, who stood sovereign over all ancestral spirits, was believed to have been above such sacrificial bribery.²

In China, the Shang inscriptions are called jiaguwen 甲骨文 which literally means writings on shells and bones. These inscriptions are known in the west as oracle bone inscriptions and oracle bone graphs. These inscribed oracle bones and shells from Yinxu initially numbered more than 150,000 pieces.³ They span a period of about 150 years during the reigns of the last Shang kings from Wu Ding to Di Xin, ca. 1200 B.C. - 1050 B.C. By 1980, about 4,500 graphs had been identified, and of these, approximately 1,106 were deciphered and matched with their modern equivalents.⁴ In all, they attest to an advanced level of the Shang writing system already attained by 1200 B.C. Moreover, this maturity indicated a much earlier period of development, and an even earlier date of origination. While archaeology has yet to reveal when, where, and who first invented writing in China, China’s ancient annals traditionally attribute the invention of writing to the time and reign of the Yellow Emperor Huangdi 黄帝 of ca. 2698-2598 B.C. This era, however, still belongs to China’s legendary history.

The Genesis account is traditionally attributed to Moses, ca. 1440 B.C.⁵, who by inspiration of God’s Holy Spirit recorded this sacred history of God’s creation. Yet, if this creation story had been centuries earlier told to Noah by his father who was 56 years old when Adam died, then it likely traveled to China with the great dispersion of peoples only five generations after the Flood as described in Genesis 11:1-9. Known as the Tower of Babel and dated by Bishop Ussher’s chronology to 2247 B.C., this world migration from the land of Shinar in Mesopotamia to all parts of the earth would have brought the creation story to China as early as the start of China’s first historical dynasty, the Xia 夏, in 2205 B.C.

Whether sourced from the great dispersion of 2247 B.C. or sometime after Moses of ca. 1440 B.C., a group of key graphs among the Shang inscriptions as early as ca. 1200 B.C. reveal that the Genesis creation story was known at the time of the invention of writing in China. In these ancient times, the cultures to the west of China were not unknown to her, as is evidenced by a Near Eastern type chariot found in one of the Shang royal tombs at Anyang.⁶ Communication, and even migrations, likely came by way of Persia and Central Asia, making entirely feasible the transmission of this remarkable story of creation from Mesopotamia to China.

However, the actual content of the late Shang inscriptions provide no evidence that the late Shang people themselves were familiar with the Genesis creation story. This fact would suggest that the script, with its imbedded creation story, was invented much earlier and why the meaning of its original etymology was apparently lost by the time of the late Shang. Still, their writings exhibit an attitude of sacredness with regard to several of the Genesis themed graphs. These graphs often appear as special names designating sacrifices, sacred areas, patriarch kings, ritual places, and semi-divine persons. This phenomenon can be explained by Bernhard Karlgren who reasoned that historically, certain words or names retained a past nimbus of sacredness or spiritual authority not fully understood by later generations, who continued to use them, nonetheless, for their lingering auspicious aura.⁷

The oracle bone inscriptions demonstrate that the early purpose of writing in China was to record important things that simply needed to be remembered. They archived the recorded oracles of the Shang king, if only as testaments of his ability to access the divine powers of the spiritual realm. This ancient penchant to record what was sacred and significant would also explain what appears to be an intentional preservation of an earliest origin story within their script, or more specifically, within the formation of several individual graphs themselves.

Presented in this book are selected forty such Genesis graphs shown in text boxes. Each records a scene of origin history as known to its Chinese inventors. Assembled, they narrate a creation story that correlates with the creation account in Genesis chapters 1-3. Moreover, these images plus several relevant graphs reveal early perceptions of later philosophical notions of man’s relationship to their supreme God who was called Shang Di by the Shang dynasty and also Tian 天, Heaven, by the succeeding Zhou dynasty. The names Shang Di and Tian were interchangeable in the early Zhou Classics.

FORMATION OF THE ORACLE BONE GRAPHS

An oracle bone graph was originally designed to give written form to a specific spoken word. Like the modern Chinese character, the oracle bone graph was formed by one or more semantic and phonetic parts that would at best represent its meaning as understood or pronounced, or both, at the time of its creation. But unlike the modern characters, of which only 3% in the 18th century were fully semantic formations, a majority 66% of the deciphered graphs of the Shang dynasty were non-phonetic semantic compositions. This is sourced in a 1980 study by the archaeologist scholar Cheng Te-k’un.⁸

The oracle bone graphs range from singular pictographs to composite logographs made up of these semantic and phonetic graph components. The Shang graph forms comprise five of the six principles of traditional character formations, known as liu shu 六書, the Six Principles of Writing. The graphs discussed in this book as embodying a Genesis theme belong primarily to the first three non-phonetic principles, i.e., the simplified pictographs, and simple and compound indicatives. These are presumed to be the earliest formation types.

The simplified pictographs [象形 xiangxing], make up 20 percent of the 1,106 graphs deciphered in Cheng’s study. Considered the earliest form of graphs, these are simple, stylized, abstract drawings of the object. The graphs sun [日 rih] and moon [月 yue] abstractly depict the round sun and crescent moon with a dot or dash marking their centers.

Understanding: The sun is pictured by its round outline and a center mark .

Understanding: The moon is pictured with a crescent outline and a center mark .

Another 2 percent are the simple indicative [指事 zhishi] graphs. Their formations rely on schematic diagrams to indicate their meanings. The graphs above [上 shang] and below [下 xia] indicate their meaning by a short line indicating the atmospheric air above or below the waters of the earth or the heavens [see page 46].

Understanding: Above is indicated by the atmospheric air above the waters of earth .

Understanding: Below is indicated by the atmospheric air below the waters of heaven .

The largest group, 36 percent of the graphs, are the compound indicatives [會意 huiyi]. They combine the meanings of two or more graphs to form a new meaning and compound graph.

The graph be bright, clear [明 ming] joins the graphs sun [日 rih] and moon [月 yue] to indicate the idea of brightness.