The Discovery of Genesis (4 page)

Because of the geographical isolation of China by mountain ranges, deserts, and oceans, this race of people was sealed off to itself, free from outside influences, as it developed its own characteristic culture, nor was it disturbed for over 2,000 years.

When the Chinese, very early in their history as a separate people, found a need to communicate with a written language, a system of word-pictures was invented in keeping with the characteristic calligraphy of the ancient world. True to all primitive written languages, these so-called pictographs were satisfactory for representing objects but carried limitations in expressing abstract concepts. The early graphic symbols, therefore, were combined in meaningful ways to convey ideas, called ideograms, and these “picture stories” of necessity had to contain common knowledge in order to be understood. It would have been only natural to use as a basis for some of the ideograms the history of the ancient beginnings of humanity with which all were familiar by oral tradition. Consequently, the written Chinese language is composed of characters uniquely adapted to the possibility of containing the stories of Genesis.

We might illustrate at this point just what an ideogram is and how a concept such as the word “tempter,” for example, could be translated into an expressive written character by graphically depicting the story of Eve’s encounter with the devil in the Garden of Eden. In this first historic moment of temptation the devil must of course be pictured. Three primitive pictographs were selected to accomplish this:
a garden, field or landed property
represents the Garden of Eden;
a man, son
shows the humanoid aspect of the devil, who spoke as a man to Eve, even though through the medium of a serpent; and the word
secret, private
conveys his clandestine approach to Eve. These three symbols, together with the “p’ieh”
indicating “alive,” are combined in
the devil
.

But to be more specific, the
devil
radical is then placed under the
cover
of protecting
trees
. The
devil
waited for Eve in the forbidden tree, which was located in the middle of the garden next to the tree of life—hence the two
trees
. Furthermore, he was under
cover
, being hidden in the tree and also camouflaged as a serpent. By uniting these primitive pictographs into an ideographic character, the word
tempter
appears to have been designed. Or were these six significant constituent symbols brought together by mere chance?