Is China in the Bible?

I was reading the Chinese Bible — the Héhéběn, the Chinese Union Version that almost every Chinese Protestant has used for a century — when Isaiah 49:12 stopped me.

這些從秦國來 — these shall come from the State of Qin. 秦國 is China, plainly. But the margin hedged: 原文作希尼 — the original text reads “Sinim.”

So the Chinese Bible says, in its own text, that China is in the Bible — that the prophet foresaw it twenty-six centuries ago — while its margin quietly keeps the stranger word underneath. I had read past the verse many times. This time I wanted to know whether the translators were right.

A Word That Appears Once⌗

The word is סינים, sinim, and it appears exactly once in the entire Hebrew Bible. There is no second use to triangulate from — a hapax legomenon, a foothold with nothing above or below it.

The old translators mostly did not see China in it. The Septuagint read “Persians”. And the long Jewish and Christian tradition pointed south, toward Egypt: the Aramaic Targum; Jerome’s Vulgate, which gave terra australis, “the southern land”; and Saadya Gaon, the towering tenth-century rabbinic authority, who placed it in Egypt.

Modern scholarship agrees, and has a manuscript to stand on. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, a thousand years older than any other complete copy, reads not sinim but swnyym — which points to Syene, the Aswan of southern Egypt, where Jews had lived since the days of the prophets. Read that way, the verse is a compass of the exile’s return: from the north, from the west, and — Sinim — from the south. The standard commentaries, Childs and Blenkinsopp and Goldingay, all read it so.¹ Not China. Egypt.

On this telling the China reading is a German accident of the nineteenth century. Wilhelm Gesenius, compiling the Hebrew lexicon that every Protestant seminary would lean on, heard the resemblance between Sin and the Qin (秦) dynasty that gave China its name in half the languages of Asia — and the missionaries, who wanted China in their Bibles, did the rest. A coincidence of sound, explained as prophecy.

That is the standard story. I believed it for a while.

China Is in the Bible⌗

Then I found Raanan Eichler.

In 2024, Eichler — a Hebrew Bible scholar at Bar-Ilan — published a paper in Vetus Testamentum, one of the discipline’s flagship journals, under the flat title “China Is in the Bible”. It argues that the consensus is wrong and the discarded China reading is right. And its case is philological, not devotional.

A few of its moves stayed with me. Aswan is no edge of the world: Kush lies beyond it, and the Hebrew Bible knows Kush intimately — a prophet reaching for the uttermost south would not stop at the border fort. “Land of the Aswanites” is not how Hebrew names a garrison town anyway; the plural form wants a people and a country. And the load-bearing argument turns on the word the King James renders “west”. In Hebrew it is yam — literally “sea”. The only other verse that pairs “north” with yam is Psalm 107:3, and there it cannot mean “west”, because “west” is already named beside it; it must mean “south.” Which means Isaiah 49:12 has named north and south before it ever reaches Sinim — and a verse that has just pointed south will not point south again with Aswan. Sinim belongs in the east or the west; and China is east.

I am not a Hebraist, and I cannot referee this. But Vetus Testamentum does not print cranks, and Eichler’s argument is not the wishful kind. A question I had assumed was settled in 1947 turns out to be live in 2024.

And then, almost in passing, Eichler did something to my tidy “nineteenth-century invention” that I have not been able to undo. Tracing the reading backward — past the missionaries, past Gesenius — he arrives at a rabbi in Mantua.

A Rabbi in Mantua⌗

Azariah dei Rossi (1511/1513–1578) was a physician and Hebraist, and the author of Meʾor ʿEinayim, “Light of the Eyes”, printed in 1573 — a book so willing to read the rabbinic past with the tools of Renaissance scholarship that it was attacked in manuscript and banned the moment it appeared: Joseph Karo drew up a writ of excommunication he died before he could sign, and the rabbis of Mantua forbade it to anyone under twenty-five.

He was no missionary; he had no China to convert. What he had was a use for the word — and the use is the whole point. He does not argue that Sinim is China. He simply reaches for it, the way you reach for a fact everyone in the room already knows.

The passage sits in a chapter on whether the ancient Greeks, and the Sages with them, knew the true size of the earth. Sketching the inhabited band of the globe, dei Rossi writes:

היינו ק״פ מעלות באורך מקצה מזרח המתחיל בקרוב מארץ סינים עד קצה המערב מקום האיים פורטונ״אטי או קאנא״ריאי

…180 degrees of longitude, from the eastern edge, which begins near the land of Sinim, to the western edge, the place of the islands, Fortunate or Canaries.

That is all of it. “The land of Sinim” is the eastern end of the map, exactly as the Canaries are the western end. No proof-text, no prophecy, no strain. A landmark an educated reader was expected to recognize on sight — two and a half centuries before any American mission board existed.

Ptolemy’s China⌗

And the landmarks are not dei Rossi’s invention either. They are Ptolemy’s.

In the second century, Ptolemy drew the prime meridian of his Geography through the Fortunate Islands — the old Greek “Islands of the Blessed”, the paradise at the western rim of the world, identified by his day with the Canaries. From there he measured eastward. Ptolemy had two Chinas. The overland one he called Sera, city of the silk-bearing Seres, and placed it at 177°15’ (I.12.10). The maritime one he called the metropolis of the Sinae (τῶν Σινῶν), and placed it further east, at a round 180° (I.14.8), noting that all agreed it lay beyond Cattigara.

Dei Rossi’s sentence runs the same axis end to end. And his 180 degrees is no rounding-up of the 177°15’: that figure reaches only the Seres, while Ptolemy’s eastern limit proper — the metropolis of the Sinae — stands at a round 180°. That is where dei Rossi lands. The word he chose for the eastern terminus, סינים, shares its root with Ptolemy’s Sinae more closely than with Sera. Where Ptolemy wrote Sinae, the Hebrew of Isaiah handed dei Rossi a word that sat in precisely the same place on the map: Sinim.

He did not have to argue that Sinim was China. On the map he had inherited — Greek and Roman and rabbinic at once — China was already where Sinim should be.

What I Think Now⌗

The China reading is not a missionary invention. It is older than that, and quieter, and far more learned: a commonplace of Renaissance geography with a pedigree running back through Ptolemy to the edge of the classical world. The missionaries did not forge it. They found it resting on the shelf and handed it a job — turned a geographer’s aside into a summons, and a summons into a century of ships.

Whether the reading is true — whether the prophet, or whoever gave us these verses, really meant the land at the eastern end of the world — I still do not know. Eichler thinks so, and argues it well. The consensus still says Aswan, and argues it well too. The honest position is that a word used once, twenty-six centuries ago, does not give up its secret easily, and that anyone who tells you the case is closed — in either direction — is telling you more than the evidence does.

But Eichler himself, in correspondence, pointed me to a deeper error than the geography. “The big whopper”, he wrote, “is that they interpreted the verse as referring to conversion to Christianity when it obviously refers rather to the return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.” He is right. Isaiah 49:12 is a promise of ingathering, not a prophecy of gentile conversion. The missionaries needed both mistakes at once: the place had to be China, and the promise had to be theirs. The geography is the hook. The subject is the real misreading.

I went looking to find out whether China was in the Bible. I came back with something stranger and more durable: a question older than the missionaries who carried it, older than the lexicographers who are blamed for it, and still, after all this time, open.

Sources, and a Request⌗

The dei Rossi passage is in Imrei Binah, the third part of Meʾor ʿEinayim, chapter 11. I read it from Isaac Benjacob’s 1863 Vilna edition, freely scanned at hebrewbooks.org/46745, page 152. I was led there by Raanan Eichler, “China Is in the Bible”, Vetus Testamentum 74 (2024). The standard complete English translation of dei Rossi is Joanna Weinberg, The Light of the Eyes (Yale, 2001).

Eichler permitted quotation of his correspondence “on the condition that you do so fairly.”

The transcription and translation below are my own, and provisional: the old print is worn in places, and a few words I have had to reconstruct. If you read the Hebrew better than I do — and many will — I would be genuinely grateful for corrections.

Appendix: The Full Passage⌗

Meʾor ʿEinayim, Imrei Binah ch. 11, from Benjacob’s Vilna 1863 edition (p. 152), with English beneath each paragraph. The text breaks off mid-sentence, where dei Rossi turns to qualify the ancient picture against the discoveries of his own century. Editorial clarifications and reconstructed words are in [square brackets]. The English translation of quoted verses is from the NET.

1.

…קדמונים או חדשים מקרוב באו. והלא על כאלה אמר נעים זמירות: כל האדם כוזב, ובנו החכם ובעל נסיון קיים אחריו אין אדם שלא יחטא, דמטבע הן במעשיו אשר מצד הגוף וחושיו, הן בדעות אשר מצד הנפש וכחותיה.

…ancients, or newcomers lately arrived? And surely it was of such men that the sweet singer [David] said, “All men are liars” (Ps. 116:11), and his wise and experienced son [Solomon] affirmed after him, “there is no man who is sinless” (1 Kings 8:46) — for this is innate to them, whether in their deeds, which proceed from the body and its senses, or in their opinions, which proceed from the soul and its faculties.

2.

והנה עודנו מדברים בסתירות אשר בין דברי רבותינו לחכמי המחקר במין הזה מן הדרושים, ישר בעיני לענין תשמעהו בסוף דברי אלה, וגם כן להערה אשר תצטרך לה בפרק הארבעים מאמר ג׳ בזכרנו מחלוקת אשר בין האחרונים ז״ל על מקום קביעות המולדות והתקופות, לדבר כמו כן על דרוש אחר עקרי והשבותו אל לבבך.

Now, while we are still treating of the contradictions between the words of our Rabbis and the scholars of inquiry in this kind of subject, it seems right to me — both in view of a matter you will hear at the close of these remarks, and on account of a note that will be needed in chapter 40 of the third essay, when we recall the dispute among the later authorities over the fixing of the molad (lunar conjunctions) and the tekufot (seasons) — to speak likewise of another fundamental topic; and take it to heart.

3.

מה כי כבר העירותיך בצדק איך הקדמונים אשר בלי שפע אלהי העלו דבריהם על ספר ולא התפשטו עד קצוי ארץ וים רתוקים, האמינו כי כדור הארץ שהוא מקיף בכל סביביו ש״ס מעלות לעמת מעלות הגלגל איננו מיושב רק ברביע ממנו, היינו ק״פ מעלות באורך מקצה מזרח המתחיל בקרוב מארץ סינים עד קצה המערב מקום האיים פורטונ״אטי או קאנא״ריאי, ומ״ב מעלות ברוחב מעיגולת סרטן הרתוקה ממשוה היום כ״ד מעלות עד העגולה הצפונית שהיא מקום שבעת הכוכבים הנקראים עיש על בניה.

For I have already rightly shown you how the ancients — who, lacking any divine inspiration, set their views down in writing and never reached the ends of the earth and the distant seas — believed that the sphere of the earth, which encompasses a full 360 degrees all around, corresponding to the degrees of the celestial sphere, is inhabited in only one quarter of it: namely, 180 degrees of longitude, from the eastern edge, which begins near the land of Sinim [China], to the western edge, the place of the Fortunate (or Canary) Islands; and 42 degrees of latitude, from the tropic of Cancer — which lies 24 degrees from the equator — up to the northern circle, the place of the seven stars called “ʿAyish with her young” (the Great Bear; cf. Job 38:32).

4.

כי הכ״ד אשר מן המשוה לעגולת סרטן כפי מה שהאמינו לא יכילו גוים באוירם את רוב החום, וכן בכ״ד הסמוכות לקוטב אין עומד לפני קרתם ורוב הקרח.

For the 24 degrees lying between the equator and the tropic of Cancer, according to their belief, the peoples there could not endure in their climate the excessive heat; and likewise in the 24 degrees adjacent to the [northern] pole, nothing can withstand their cold and the abundance of ice.

5.

ובשטח הזה של הק״פ מעלות באורך ומ״ב ברוחב כאמור ציירו את שבעת האקלמים כמו שבע רצועות ארוכות אשר יבדילם זה מזה, היות בין האחד לחברו קדימת חצי שעה בזריחת השמש.

And within this zone of 180 degrees of longitude and 42 of latitude, as stated, they depicted the seven climes as seven long strips, separated one from another, there being between each one and the next a difference of half an hour in the rising of the sun [i.e., in the length of the longest day].

6.

אך ברביע הכדור אשר ממשוה היום נוכח קוטב דרום, זולתי קצת דעות שנמצא ישוב בי״ו מעלות האמצעיות בו, וכן בכל חצי הכדור אשר מנגד לחצי הכדור הנזכר אליבא דכולהו אין בהם ישוב.

But in the quarter of the sphere running from the equator toward the south pole — except for a few opinions that habitation is found in its 16 middle degrees — and likewise in the entire hemisphere opposite the inhabited one, according to all authorities there is no habitation.

7.

כי אמרו כתורף הדברים אשר כתב החכם ישראלי בספרו יסוד עולם שער ב׳ סוף פרק ב׳ וז״ל: הנה נתבאר ועלה בידינו כי באמרו ית׳ יקוו המים נחלק כדור הארץ לשני חצאין, האחד מגולה לאויר אשר בחלק ידוע ממנו כנזכר התפשט הישוב, והחצי השני הוא מכוסה במי הים הגדול טבוע בהם, כי זהו לרוקע הארץ על המים והוא על ימים יסדה עכ״ל.

For they spoke in keeping with what the sage [Isaac] Israeli wrote in his book Yesod ʿOlam, gate 2, end of chapter 2, in these words: “Behold, it has been made clear and established by us that when He, may He be blessed, said, ‘Let the water be gathered’ (Gen. 1:9), the sphere of the earth was divided into two halves. The one is exposed to the air, and in a known portion of it the habitation spread out; while the second half is covered over by the waters of the Great Sea, submerged in them — for this is the meaning of ‘The one who spread out the earth over the water’ (Ps. 136:6), and ‘He set its foundation upon the seas’ (Ps. 24:2)” — thus far his words.

8.

וכן תמצא לחכם א״ע ׳ולקמחי ז״ל בתחלת מזמור לה׳ הארץ ומלואה שהכדור חציו העליון מגולה וחציו התחתון נתון במים.

And likewise you will find in Ibn Ezra and Kimchi, of blessed memory, at the beginning of [their comment on] the psalm “The LORD owns the earth and all it contains” (Ps. 24:1) — that the upper half of the sphere is exposed and its lower half is set within the waters.

9.

גם הרב המורה במשלו אשר נתן חלק א׳ פרק ע״ג נגד ציור הדמיון משני האנשים העומדים על שתי קצות הקוטר הנכחי לאופק הנכחי היינו אחד במזרח ואחד במערב, אלו לא האמין זה היה מפריז על המדה להזכיר כל יושבי חצי הכדור אשר מתחת.

Maimonides too (the Rav, author of the Guide), in the illustration he gave in Part I, chapter 73 — the imagined figure of two men standing at the two ends of the diameter along the horizon, one in the east and one in the west: had he not held this [view, that the underside is uninhabited], he would have overstepped all proportion in mentioning every dweller of the lower half of the sphere.

10.

ומפורסם הוא שכל הדברים האלה הם כפי הדעת הקדמון הנמצא גם כן לחכמינו במדבר סיני רבה י״ג ובפרט לר׳ יונה שם, ובירושלמי דאלילים באמרם שהעולם ככדור והים כקערה בכל אשר זכרנו למעלה. ועם היות באמת…

And it is well known that all these matters accord with the ancient view, found among our Sages as well — in Numbers Rabbah 13, and especially in R. Yonah there, and in the Jerusalem Talmud, tractate ʿAvodah Zarah — in their saying that the world is like a ball and the sea like a bowl, in all that we have recounted above. And although, in truth…