In The Beginning
Jiyoon Lee


In The Beginning

Border Sacrifice to ShangTi
“When Te [ShangTi], the Lord, had so decreed, He called into existence heave, earth, and man. Between heaven and earth He separated placed in order men and things, all overspread by the heavens.”
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Genesis 1:24 NKJV
“The Lord created the heavens by His command, the sun, moon, and stars by His spoken word…. When He spoke, the world was created; at His command everything appeared.”

“In the Beginning” illustrates the connection between biblical genesis and ancient Chinese concepts of early earth history. The overall structure of these symbols exhibits the method in creation from God creating the world in six days up to the divine rest on the seventh day. The shape and position of individual symbols adopt the radical system in ancient Chinese characters. The Chinese and Hebrew records of the beginning are interchangeable. After the introduction of Confucianism and
Taoism in the 9th century B.C., followed by Buddhism from in the 1st century B.C., ShangTi was largely forgotten as the one and only God in China. But the traces and narrative of the oldest recorded God in China has been preserved in the ancient character- writing system of Chinese. Instead of characters deriving from everyday life and ordinary objects, ideographs of ancient Chinese might include God’s plan laid out in the book of Genesis. These symbols intend to demonstrate the correlation within the creation narrative of two distinguished Chinese and Hebrew ancient civilization.