OBJECTIVE:Ministries

Often the atheist will protest that the Flood could not have happened since other cultures of the world make no mention of it, as they surely must if it was truly a global flood. However, the atheist would be greatly mistaken to mention this. All cultures around the world make some reference to a large flood in their traditions. One culture in particular has even recorded the historical event in the very characters that make up its written language: the Chinese. Although the Chinese (descendants of Noah [Gen. 10] and the Shinarian diaspora [Gen. 11:1-9], as are we all) eventually forgot their origins and turned to pagan superstitions, the memory of the great Flood lives on as linguistic fossils embedded in their characters for "boat" and "drown".

The Chinese writing system is pictographic in nature; its characters are made up of symbolic illustrations of things or ideas, most of which look rather abstract due to simplification over time. Many characters are made by combining different characters to create a kind of story or vignette. Chinese writing predates their fall into the miasma of pagan beliefs and false history, and as such contains ideas and representations not found in their latter traditions.

Let's look at the Chinese character for "boat" and how it is constructed:

As we can see, the etymology of boat is the characters for "vessel", "eight" and "person". Sound familiar? The ancient Chinese, having traveled into Asia after the Lord scattered the citizenry of Babel [Gen. 11:8], still recalled the history of their origin and applied that knowledge in the creation of their new writing system. When they needed a character to mean "boat", what could be more obvious than to allude to the most famous boat of them all, Noah's Ark, and the eight people - Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives [Gen. 6:10,18 7:7] - who were on board. (Also, this honoring of Noah may be seen as part of the origin of the debased ancestor worship cults that infected China, the ancient Chinese still knowing at this point that they are descendants of Noah.)

While this is a very impressive proof of the historicity of the Flood, it is not the only one to be found in the Chinese pictographs. The character for "drown" tells the story of what befell the other people living in Noah's day. This character is more complicated, made of a number of compound parts, so we'll go through it step by step:

Here we have the character for "united" or "all". It is made up of "man", "one" and "person". Symbolically this means that all men are as one person, united in their opinions, actions, and speech. In Genesis 6 we see that all of mankind - save Noah and his generations - are united in their corruption. Also, we may infer from Genesis 11 that these antediluvian men all spoke as one, using one language, since it was only after the building of the tower of Babel that the Lord saw to confound the singular language of man. The character for "person" has a dual meaning of "mouth".

Next we have the character for "to cover over". It is made up of "united" and "hands joined". This symbolizes a united people, their hands joined together, forming a shield to cover over something that they wish to protect - or hide in shame?

Finally we come to the character for "drown". We see that it is made of "to cover over" and "water", obviously symbolizing water covering over that which is drowned. But symbolically what is being drowned in this character? There's a double meaning here, for it is both all as well as mankind united as one person, speaking in one language, being covered over in the waters as they join their hands in a futile and arrogant attempt to form a shield against the raging waters. There is only one event in history that fits that description, and that is the Flood.

For more, see:

• Chinese Memories of Noah's Flood
• The Discovery of Genesis: How the Truths of Genesis Were Found Hidden in the Chinese Language, C.H. Kang and Ethel Nelson