In the Beginning...

(sang / death, funeral, mourning)
The traditional character still retains the two mouth symbols, but the simplified version has only two short lines in their place. That diminishes the impact of having two mouths and multiple hands in a tree creating a meaning of death, the penalty that God specified for the disobedience.

The spiritual death and separation from fellowship with the perfect God was immediate. The physical death came later. (The Hebrew reads, 'dying, you will die'; it is a process leading to the final stoppage.)

God placed curses on the serpent, the woman, and the man, and these curses affected the rest of creation as a byproduct. God's curse for Adam:

Genesis 3:17-19
To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it', "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return." NIV
And he said to the man, "You listened to your wife and ate the fruit which I told you not to eat. Because of what you have done, the ground will be under a curse. You will have to work hard all your life to make it produce enough food for you. It will produce weeds and thorns, and you will have to eat wild plants. You will have to work hard and sweat to make the soil produce anything, until you go back to the soil from which you were formed. You were made from soil, and you will become soil again." TEV

U
T

(zhi / stop)
The oracle bone character for stop shows a foot and big toe.


A person stopping among the two special trees has brought about the penalty of thorns because the wrong tree was sampled. (I could not verify the modern character in my dictionaries.)

Similarly, 2 trees + two personal cloths (jin / scarf, kerchief, towel) = (ji / thornbushes). Thornbushes are one of the penalties for being in the wrong tree. (There was no cloth or clothing during the disobedience. It came afterward - see next page.)

(kun / in distress, hard-pressed)
Forever afterwards, there is an association between a tree in a garden and subsequent hardships.

(xin / heart, feeling, emotion, mind)
(fei / not, wrong) + (xin / heart) = (bei / sorrow, sadness) Sorrow and sadness has been forever a part of human experience since the disobedience.

(gan / shield, offend, interfere, involved in)
(nu / woman)
+ = (jian / traitor, wicked, evil)
The Chinese characters are blaming the woman for the disobedience and start of sin. However, the later parts of the Bible place the blame on Adam. He was the accountable person and was beside Eve when she ate the prohibited fruit and then ate some himself. He had failed to stop Eve and joined in the crime.

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Beginning, Oracle Bones, God, Water, Earth, Mankind, Adam, Eve, Good Tree, Bad Tree, Penalty, Clothes, Lamb, Gate, Murder, Flood, Lifespans, Scattering, Border Sacrifice, Genesis 1 to 11