China in Biblical History

Jonathan Edwards summarized a widely held opinion when he claimed that Chinese language and civilization perpetuated the language and civilization of the immediate post-diluvian world: “Their language seems not to have been altered in the confusion of Babel. Their learning is reported to have been full as ancient as the learning of the more western nations. Their polity is of another sort, and their government established on very different maxims and foundations” ( Notes on Scripture , 536).

The same goes for the parallels he drew between the life and career of Noah and the life and career of the first Chinese king, Fohi: “(1) They say Fohi had no father, i.e. Noah was the first man in the post-diluvian world. His ancestors perished in the flood; and no tradition hereof being preserved in the Chinese annals, Noah, or Fohi, stands there as if he had no father at all. (2) Fohi’s mother is said to have conceived him encompassed with a rainbow, a conceit very probably arising from the rainbow’s first appearing to Noah, and the Chinese being willing to give some account of his original . . . .

“(3) Fohi is said carefully to have bred seven sorts of creatures, which he used to sacrifice to the supreme spirit of heaven and earth; and Moses tells us, that Noah took into the ark, of every clean beast by sevens, and of fowls of the air by sevens. And after the flood Noah built an altar unto the Lord, and took of every clean beast and every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings. (Lastly) The Chinese history supposes Fohi to have settled in the province of Xeusi, which is the northwest province of China, and near to Ararat where the ark rested. And the history of the world does necessarily suppose that these eastern parts of the world were soon peopled, and as populous as the land of Shinar. For in a few ages, in the days of Ninus and Semiramis, about three hundred years after the dispersion of mankind, the nations that came of that dispersion attacked the inhabitants of the East with their united force, but found the nations about Bactria, and the parts where we suppose Noah to settle, fully able to resist and repel all their armies. Noah therefore came out of the ark near Saga Scythia, on the hills beyond Bactria, north to India. Here he lived, and settled a numerous part of his posterity, by his counsels and advice. He himself planted a vineyard, lived a life of retirement, and having seen his offspring spread around him, died in a good old age. As they spread down to India south, and further east into China, so ‘tis probable they also peopled Scythia, and afterwards the more northern continent; and if America be anywhere joined to it, perhaps all that part of the world came from these originals” (536-7).