Sinim
The land of Sin or Sinim is a biblical hapax legomenon that appears in Isaiah 49:12: "Behold, these shall come from far: and, lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim." The Greek Septuagint instead says, "from the land of the Persians."
Some English versions simply transliterate the word, others translate the Hebrew as Syene, and still others associate Sin with China. Sinim resembles Sinae, the Latinization of Qin, after the Qin state, founded in 778 BC, and the Qin dynasty, founded in 221 BC by Qin Shi Huang-Di.
Young's Analytical Concordance to the Bible defines the word as "a people in the far east; the Chinese?" The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says, "The land is clearly far off, and it must be sought either in the South or in the East. Many scholars have favored identification with China, the classical Sinae. It seems improbable that Jews had already found their way to China; but from very early times trade relations were established with the Far East by way of Arabia and the Persian Gulf; and the name may have been used by the prophet simply as suggesting extreme remoteness....While no certain decision is possible, probability points to the East, and China cannot be quite ruled out." Modern translations of the Bible tend to translate Sinim as Syene because the Isaiah Scroll">Book of Isaiah">Isaiah Scroll of the Dead Sea Scrolls uses that word.
In modern Hebrew, Sin is the word for China, just as modern Hebrew uses other ambiguous biblical place names for contemporary countries, such as Sfarad for Spain and Tzarfat for France.
In the Vulgate, Jerome of Stridon translated “Sinim” as "Terra Australis" into Latin. Also, Sinim may be derived from the old Hebrew words "Sinah" or "Sneh", meaning a hostile bush. This lends credence to the purely speculative thesis that Sinim – according to Isaiah 49 – refers to a land of bushes located at the ends of the Earth, i.e. Australia, although Jews and Europeans had no knowledge of it at the time. This thesis was notably put forward by Herbert Armstrong to justify British Israelism.
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