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com/biography/Shihuangdi January 7,2019

Shihuangdi
EMPEROR OF QIN DYNASTY
WRITTEN BY:
Claudius Cornelius Müller
LAST UPDATED: Nov 15, 2018
Shihuangdi
EMPEROR OF QIN DYNASTY

BORN
c. 259 BCE
China
DIED
210 BCE
China
TITLE / OFFICE
 King, Qin (246BC-221BC)
 Emperor, China (221BC-210BC)
HOUSE / DYNASTY
 Qin dynasty

Alternative Titles: Chin Shih huang-ti, Shi Huang Di, Shi huangdi, Shih-huang-ti, Ying Zheng, Zhao Zheng, Zheng of Qin
Shihuangdi, Wade-Giles romanization Shih-huang-ti, personal name (xingming) Zhao Zheng or Ying Zheng,
(born c. 259 BCE, Qin state, northwestern China—died 210 BCE, Hebei), emperor (reigned 221–210 BCE) of the Qin
dynasty (221–207 BCE) and creator of the first unified Chinese empire (which collapsed, however, less than four years
after his death).

Early Years
Zhao Zheng was born the son of Zhuangxiang (who later became king of the state of Qin in northwestern China) while
his father was held hostage in the state of Zhao. His mother was a former concubine of a rich merchant, Lü Buwei, who,
guided by financial interests, managed to install Zhuangxiang on the throne, even though he had not originally been
designated as successor. The tradition, once widely accepted, that Zheng was actually Lü Buwei’s natural son is probably
a slanderous invention.
When Zheng, at age 13, formally ascended the throne in 246 BCE, Qin already was the most powerful state and was
likely to unite the rest of China under its rule. The central states had considered Qin to be a barbarous country, but by
that time its strong position on the mountainous western periphery (with its centre in the modern province of Shaanxi)
enabled Qin to develop a strong bureaucraticgovernment and military organization as the basis of the totalitarian state
philosophy known as legalism.
Until Zheng was officially declared of age in 238, his government was headed by Lü Buwei. Zheng’s first act as king was
to execute his mother’s lover, who had joined the opposition, and to exile Lü, who had been involved in the affair. A
decree ordering the expulsion of all aliens, which would have deprived the king of his most competent advisers, was
annulled at the urging of Li Si, later grand councillor. By 221, with the help of espionage, extensive bribery, and the
ruthlessly effective leadership of gifted generals, Zheng had eliminated one by one the remaining six rival states
that constituted China at that time, and the annexation of the last enemy state, Qi, in 221 marked his final triumph: for
the first time China was united, under the supreme rule of the Qin.
Emperor Of China
To herald his achievement, Zheng assumed the sacred titles of legendary rulers and proclaimed himself Shihuangdi
(“First Sovereign Emperor”). With unbounded confidence, he claimed that his dynasty would last “10,000 generations.”
As emperor he initiated a series of reforms aimed at establishing a fully centralized administration, thus avoiding the rise
of independent satrapies. Following the example of Qin and at the suggestion of Li Si, he abolished territorial feudal
power in the empire, forced the wealthy aristocratic families to live in the capital, Xianyang, and divided the country into
36 military districts, each with its own military and civil administrator. He also issued orders for almost universal
standardization—from weights, measures, and the axle lengths of carts to the written language and the laws.
Construction of a network of roads and canals was begun, and fortresses erected for defense against barbarian invasions
from the north were linked to form the Great Wall.
In 220 Shihuangdi undertook the first of a series of imperial inspection tours that marked the remaining 10 years of his
reign. While supervising the consolidation and organization of the empire, he did not neglect to perform sacrifices in
various sacred places, announcing to the gods that he had finally united the empire, and he erected stone tablets with
ritual inscriptions to extol his achievements.
Another motive for Shihuangdi’s travels was his interest in magic and alchemy and his search for masters in these arts
who could provide him with the elixir of immortality. After the failure of such an expedition to the islands in the Eastern
Sea—possibly Japan—in 219, the emperor repeatedly summoned magicians to his court. Confucian scholars strongly
condemned the step as charlatanry, and it is said that 460 of them were executed for their opposition. The continuous
controversy between the emperor and Confucian scholars who advocated a return to the old feudal order culminated in
the famous burning of the books of 213, when, at Li Si’s suggestion, all books not dealing with agriculture, medicine, or
prognostication were burned, except historical records of Qin and books in the imperial library.
The last years of Shihuangdi’s life were dominated by an ever-growing distrust of his entourage—at least three
assassination attempts nearly succeeded—and his increasing isolation from the common people. Almost inaccessible in
his huge palaces, the emperor led the life of a semidivine being. In 210 Shihuangdi died during an inspection tour. He
was buried in a gigantic funerary compound hewn out of a mountain and shaped in conformity with the symbolic
patterns of the cosmos. (Excavation of this enormous complex of some 20 square miles [50 square km]—now known as
the Qin tomb—began in 1974, and the complex was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987. Among the
findings at the site were some 8,000 life-sized terra-cotta soldier and horse figures forming an “army” for the dead king.)
The disappearance of Shihuangdi’s forceful personality immediately led to the outbreak of fighting among supporters of
the old feudal factions that ended in the collapse of the Qin dynasty and the extermination of the entire imperial clan by
206.
Terra-cotta soldiers and horses in the tomb of the Qin emperor Shihuangdi, near Xi'an, Shaanxi province, China.Digital
Vision/Thinkstock
Terra-cotta soldiers in the Qin tomb, near Xi'an, Shaanxi province, China.© Lukas Hlavac/Fotolia
Most of the information about Shihuangdi’s life derives from the successor Han dynasty, which prized Confucian
scholarship and thus had an interest in disparaging the Qin period. The report that Shihuangdi was an illegitimate son of
Lü Buwei is possibly an invention of that epoch. Further, stories describing his excessive cruelty and the general
defamation of his character must be viewed in the light of the distaste felt by the ultimately victorious Confucians for
legalist philosophy in general.
Shihuangdi certainly had an imposing personality and showed an unbending will in pursuing his aim of uniting and
strengthening the empire. His despotic rule and the draconian punishments he meted out were dictated largely by his
belief in legalist ideas. With few exceptions, the traditional historiography of imperial China has regarded him as the
villain par excellence, inhuman, uncultivated, and superstitious. Modern historians, however, generally stress the
endurance of the bureaucratic and administrative structure institutionalized by Shihuangdi, which, despite its official
denial, remained the basis of all subsequent dynasties in China.

https://catholicexchange.com/why-do-christians-worship-on-sunday January 7, 2018

AUGUST 23, 2018

Why Do Christians Worship on Sunday?
JP NUNEZ
There are few things more recognizably Christian than going to church on Sunday. Just about every Christian church—
whether Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox—reserves Sunday as a special day of rest and worship, and just about
everybody in our culture knows it. However, what isn’t nearly as well known is why we worship on Sunday. On the
surface, it does not seem to be any better or different from any other day, so it is not immediately obvious why we
would set aside this particular day for rest and worship.
If you do a bit of digging, you might find out that Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday (Matthew 28:1, Mark 16:2, Luke
24:1, John 20:1), so we reserve Sunday as our special day in order to commemorate his resurrection. However, that
doesn’t answer the question quite as fully as we might think. See, in the Old Testament, the Israelites were commanded
to worship on Saturday (Exodus 20:8-11, 23:12), as Jews do to this day, so a question still remains for us: Why did the
day of Jesus’ resurrection make us change our weekly day of worship? To answer that and fully understand why
Christians worship on Sunday, we have to dig deeper into salvation history and piece together several clues that we find
scattered throughout Scripture.
The Meaning of Saturday
The first thing we need to do is understand why the Israelites worshipped on Saturday, and luckily for us, the Old
Testament is pretty explicit about that. In fact, it gives us two explanations of this practice:
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a
Sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or
your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days the Lord made heaven and
earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and
hallowed it.” (Exodus 20:8-11)

“Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor, and do all
your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or
your daughter, or your manservant, or your maidservant, or your ox, or your ass, or any of your cattle, or the sojourner
who is within your gates, that your manservant and your maidservant may rest as well as you. You shall remember that
you were a servant in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out thence with a mighty hand and an
outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.” (Deuteronomy 5:12-15)
When we read these two texts in tandem, we can see that Saturday had a dual meaning for the Israelites. First, it
commemorated creation. Just as God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, so too were his people to
work for six days every week and then rest and worship on the seventh. Likewise, Saturday also commemorated the
exodus, God’s miraculous rescue of his people from Egypt under the leadership of Moses. Every week, the Israelites
were supposed to remember and celebrate these two great events as they rested from their work and worshipped God.
Prophetic Hopes
At first, this double meaning may seem strange to us. Creation and the exodus don’t have much to do with each other,
so it is difficult to see why God would want his people to commemorate both of them with one feast rather than give
each one its own separate celebration. Scripture does not explicitly address this issue, but I would suggest that the key
to resolving this difficulty lies in the prophets. Specifically, the prophets used several images to describe the salvation
that Jesus would one day win for humanity, and two of them are very relevant to our topic here. First, they sometimes
described that salvation as a new creation:
“For behold, I create new heavens
and a new earth;
and the former things shall not be remembered
or come into mind.” (Isaiah 65:17)
Likewise, the prophets also said that our salvation would be like a new exodus:
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
And there I will give her her vineyards,
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.” (Hosea 2:14-15)
Once we realize this, we can begin to understand why the Israelites were commanded to celebrate creation and the
exodus on the same day: those events both pointed forward to something greater. They foreshadowed the new exodus
and the new creation, the salvation that Jesus would one day win for the entire human race. This then tells us something
important about the Israelites’ worship on Saturday: it was destined to be transcended. Since the dual meaning of
Saturday pointed to something greater, it stands to reason that once that “something greater” finally came, God’s
people would celebrate it every week instead of creation and the exodus. As a result, now that Jesus has redeemed us
from our sins, it makes perfect sense for our weekly worship to commemorate his saving work rather than the great
works of God that foreshadowed it.
The Resurrection
However, that doesn’t get us all the way to the resurrection. It still leaves us with one last question: Why do we
commemorate the day of the week Jesus rose from the death rather than, say, the day he was born or the day he died?
And to answer that, we need to look at what the New Testament tells us about his resurrection. More specifically, we
have to understand how the resurrection fulfilled the images of new creation and new exodus specifically.
Let’s begin with new creation. Scripture never uses that exact phrase to describe the resurrection, but we can see from
various passages that the new creation began when Jesus rose from the dead. The book of Revelation tells us that the
restoration of heaven and earth foretold by Isaiah will happen at the end of human history when Jesus comes again
(Revelation 21:1), and St. Paul tells us that at that time, the faithful departed will rise from the dead and get their bodies
back just like did Jesus did (1 Thessalonians 4:14-16, 1 Corinthians 15:20-23). As a result, when he rose from the dead,
Jesus entered into the life of the new creation, thereby inaugurating it in his own body.
The connection between the resurrection and the new exodus is a bit harder to see, but it’s there nonetheless. St. Paul
tells us that Jesus was sacrificed as “our paschal lamb” (1 Corinthians 5:7), which implies that the resurrection was in fact
a crucial part of the new exodus. See, the adjective “paschal” refers to the Passover, the feast that was instituted and
first celebrated the night before the Israelites escaped from Egypt (Exodus 12:1-28). Now, the Passover was just the
beginning of the exodus, so if Jesus’ death was our new Passover, then the new exodus must have extended beyond it.
In another letter, St. Paul tells us that Jesus’ resurrection was also part of his saving work (Romans 4:25), so it too must
have been part of the new exodus.
The Meaning of Sunday
When we put this all together, we can see why Christians reserve Sunday as a special day of rest and worship. In the Old
Testament, the Israelites were commanded to set aside Saturday as their special day, and they did so in order to
commemorate creation and the exodus, two events that foreshadowed the salvation that Jesus would one day gain for
us. The prophets said that Jesus’ salvation would be like a new creation and a new exodus, and the New Testament tells
us that those two images were both fulfilled in his resurrection, which happened on a Sunday. As a result, we can see
that the meaning of Saturday in the Old Testament is fulfilled in Sunday, so it makes perfect sense for Christians to
worship on the first day of the week instead of the last.

By JP Nunez
JP Nunez has been a theology nerd since high school. He has master's degrees in both theology and philosophy (with a
concentration in bioethics) from Franciscan University of Steubenville, and he spent three years in Catholic University of
America's doctoral program in biblical studies before realizing that academia isn't where he wants to be. During his time
in Steubenville, he worked for two years as an intern at the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, where his
responsibilities included answering theological questions and helping to format and edit their Journey Through Scripture
Bible studies.