Genesis and the Mystery Confucius Couldn't Solve

Rating:
Summary: Historic context
Review: Hold on there, dudes. Etymology of Chinese characters does NOT prove that they independently developed a prehistory based on Adam & Eve and the Great Flood. The Chinese alphabet evolved much later than Sumerian. Historians already recognize that trade brought not only the idea of writing from Sumer to other cultures but also their prehistory. All we can accurately say is that Sumerian writing and prehistory influenced the development of Chinese writing. That is not the same thing as saying that China preserved its own memory of the same events. Please do read the book, but with a healthy context rather than a wild eyed, unsubstantiated and unsupportable conclusion.

Rating:
Summary: Historic context
Review: I found the book quite enlightening. Many of the pictographs from ancient chinese as depicted in oracle bone and bronzeware writings, are strikingly telling of the genesis creation account. There were too many such examples to list them all here. On the other hand, there were a few that were....well, a stretch. The authors premise is that the pictographs were formed and accepted because the creation account passed down through the generations was universally recognized information. For example, the pictograph for dusk is a man, woman, and God behind gates in a garden. This is strongly reminiscent of the the genesis account of God visiting with Adam and Eve at Dusk as described in Genesis. In any event, the book is has enough of these examples to be worth reading. It is very good evidence that all races had one and the same beginning and God. It also provides evidence that monotheism was first.

Rating:
Summary: Enlightening
Review: I found the book quite enlightening. Many of the pictographs from ancient chinese as depicted in oracle bone and bronzeware writings, are strikingly telling of the genesis creation account. There were too many such examples to list them all here. On the other hand, there were a few that were....well, a stretch. The authors premise is that the pictographs were formed and accepted because the creation account passed down through the generations was universally recognized information. For example, the pictograph for dusk is a man, woman, and God behind gates in a garden. This is strongly reminiscent of the the genesis account of God visiting with Adam and Eve at Dusk as described in Genesis. In any event, the book is has enough of these examples to be worth reading. It is very good evidence that all races had one and the same beginning and God. It also provides evidence that monotheism was first.

Rating:
Summary: Sheer Fantasy
Review: The kinds of analysis given in this book are totally without foundation.

Ethel Nelson's previous book on this subject, "The Discovery of Genesis: How the Truths of Genesis Were Found Hidden in the Chinese Languages" was based on modern Kaishu forms, which are often totally different from the original forms, so that the elements into which the characters were analyzed did not even exist in the original forms.

When this was pointed out to Nelson after the publication of that book, she then came out with this one, scrapping most of her previous contentions and producing new ones, using older character forms as a basis. However, the authors are careful to pick and choose forms that support their analysis, even if other forms are far more common. You can find lots of samples of oracle bone characters on the Web. See for yourself. In fact, it appears that some may be made up on the basis of related forms, as I can't find any examples of them.

Also, this book and the previous one share another set of problems. Nelson and her co-authors seem to have no idea that the origins of specific Chinese characters have been well understood for quite some time. They don't even recognize that the vast majority of characters are not simple indicative or compound indicative forms, as they would have us believe, but are semantic-phonetic compounds. They consistently miss this well-know point. It is obvious that they have never read a single work on this subject, but have simply made up their own stories out of whole cloth. This is nothing more than a work of imaginative fiction.

They also don't realize that many characters are known to be phonetic loans. For example, "lai2" ("to come") was originally a character for "barley" or some related grain, also pronounced "lai2". For a while, the same form was used for both. Later on, the "grass" radical was added to the "barley" character to distinguish it. This becomes quite obvious when you compare the character for "barley" with the character for "wheat" ("mai4"), as they have many elements in common. It is simply ridiculous to analyze the character as two people (presumably Adam and Eve) coming from behind a tree. They even analyze the hook at the bottom of the vertical center stroke as "possibly representing a foot...to indicate movement". They didn't even know that the hook is a modern innovation in the brush-written form, and does not even appear in older forms. It's really sad to see people taken in by such nonsensical fantasies.

It's quite amusing to see how Nelson confidently puts forth one analysis of a particular character, like the one for "fire", in the first book, and then produces an equally confident explanation of the same character in the second book that completely contradicts the first one. The fact is that the second analysis is just as baseless as the first.

A final problem with both books is that many of the characters that they analyze did not even exist in the beginning stages of the writing system, which is what these books are trying to deal with. That is, there are no examples of the existence of these characters among the Shang period oracle bone characters--only about 1000 of which had even been deciphered at the time of publication.

If you want to know something about how Chinese characters are really composed, I suggest starting with "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy", by John DeFrancis. If you want to know more about Chinese oracle bone characters, try "Sources of Shang History" (pretty expensive), by David N. Keightley. A cheaper, but less reliable, source is "The Composition of Common Chinese Characters: An Illustrated Account", from Peking University Press. Even Wieger's "Chinese Characters: Their origin, etymology, history, classification, and signification." is light years ahead of Nelson's attempts. (Parts of this were simply copied word-for-word from my review of Nelson's first book.)