Genesis and the Mystery Confucius Couldn't Solve

by Ethel R. Nelson & Richard E. Broadberry

This is the second of Nelson’s books on how the Chinese language parallels the Genesis account. This volume seeks to further the case made in The Discovery of Genesis by looking at an even more ancient form of Chinese writing. “The mystery Confucius couldn’t solve” is a reference to the 4000-year-old Border Sacrifice that the Chinese emperors participated in annually. The basic premise of the book is that ShangTi, the Chinese Creator God, is to be identified with the biblical Shaddai, and the Border Sacrifice illustrates the theological ancestry, which is reinforced by the accounts of Genesis being seen in the language itself.

In about the same proportion that I enjoyed the first volume, and found the case it built compelling, I found this one lacking. I would hesitate to say that it was bad, but I might not hesitate too long. In the previous volume, the bulk of their examples are straightforward correlations between the language and the Biblical account. This volume’s illustrations are a little fuzzy around the edges, to say the least. The examples required more explanation of how each symbol could fit into the various stories, leaving me with the feeling that either the Chinese writers had done a fair amount of interpreting the stories, or they could very well be based on different, but similar, stories. In fact, the authors did a fair amount of interpreting and reading between the lines of the Genesis story to make the symbols fit. The word breath, for example is comprised of one mouth over another mouth. This “mouth-to-mouth” picture is, according to the authors, a picture of God leaning down from heaven and breathing into Adam the breath of life. And that’s one of the more straightforward examples in the book.

In another place, they suppose that the Chinese and Hebrews have the same conception of God: three divine beings working in concert (35). But there is little evidence of a belief in the plurality of deity in the Old Testament, and certainly no evidence of the so-called Trinity.

All in all, I found this book to be terribly disappointing. So much so that it’s one of the few I just stopped reading. I still heartily recommend the first work on this subject; but I heartily recommend you skip the second installment.