Supposed Anachronisms

Critics have often taken pleasure in pointing out what they consider to be anachronisms in the Book of Mormon. They note, for example, that Nephi, who lived about 600 B.C., had a bow of “fine steel,” but such weapons were unknown at that time. Steel, they contend, is an alloy that was not known to the ancients. The steel blade of Laban’s sword is thus also an impossibility.

It is ironic that those who level this criticism at the Book of Mormon fail to take the King James Version of the Bible to task for its use of the term “bow of steel” in three passages and the use of the term “steel” in Jeremiah 15:12. The Hebrew word behind these passages is actually the term used for copper and its alloys, notably bronze.

The word “steel,” today used to refer to a specific range of iron alloys, did not always have that meaning. Steel as we know it had not yet been invented at the time the King James Bible was translated. In those days, “steel” referred to anything hard, which could apply to bronze or various other metals as also to iron. Even in Joseph Smith’s day, one of the meanings given in Webster’s 1828 dictionary for “steel” was “extreme hardness,” while the verbal form means “to make hard.” The second entry under the noun “steel” says the word is used figuratively for “weapons; particularly of defensive weapons, swords, spears and the like.”

Hugh Nibley has pointed out that Nephi’s bow was probably a composite weapon, part metal and part wood. He noted that the Canaanite “chariots of iron” were not solid iron, but merely iron-trimmed, and that various other iron tools mentioned in the Bible undoubtedly had wooden handles. If Nephi possessed a composite bow, made mostly of wood, this would more readily explain how he could have accidentally broken it. Indeed, the story reminds us of a Bible passage that cites a Psalm in which David declared, “He teacheth my hands to war; so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms.”

Another criticism leveled against the Book of Mormon is the mention of the “brass plates” of Laban. Critics contend that this is an anachronism because brass, a copper/zinc alloy, was not invented until Roman times. The term “brass” is used 116 times in the Old Testament of the King James Bible to translate the Hebrew term that means “copper” or “bronze.” Since the term was used in the Bible known to Joseph Smith, the argument about the copper/zinc alloy is pointless.

Much ink has been wasted on the argument that Alma 11:5-20 is anachronistic because the first coins were not minted until a century after Lehi supposedly left Jerusalem. While some commentators have assumed that the passage refers to coins, the text itself does not say that these monetary units were coins. Before stamped coins were invented in the late sixth century B.C., pieces of precious metals of varying weight were used as a medium of exchange. It is undoubtedly in this context that we must read of the Nephite monetary system. The most common Israelite unit of weight was the shekel, deriving from the verb meaning “to weigh,” a word that later denoted a coin of the prescribed weight. Most occurrences of the term “shekel” are in Exodus through Numbers, with the heaviest concentration in the latter book. The Hebrew term “gerah,” which denoted a smaller piece of money (but probably not a coin), is found only in the Old Testament books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Ezekiel. If these were intended to be coins only, then the use of the names in books attributed to Moses would make the Bible anachronistic, too.

According to the Book of Mormon, Lehi used a “compass” to guide him in his travels to the New World. Critics are wont to point out that the magnetic compass was discovered in the late middle ages in China and was unknown in the ancient Near East. Though the word “compass” in our day usually denotes a device used to determine the direction of magnetic north, it need not have that meaning in the Book of Mormon. The word “compass” may have been the closest equivalent of the original word available to Joseph Smith in the English language. Moreover, “compass” has several other meanings in English and originally meant “circle” (as in the compass used to draw circles). The word “compass” also appears a number of times in the King James Version of the Bible, usually as a verb but sometimes as a noun. We should also note that the fact that the Lord had to “prepare” the device for Lehi implies that it was an instrument not known in his day. So we don’t have to worry about whether it was a magnetic compass or not, on the grounds that such an instrument didn’t exist at that time. The Lord surely knew the principles on which the magnetic compass works, and could have provided one for Lehi. But it’s unlikely that this is what the Book of Mormon intended.

The mention of windows that could be “dashed in pieces” in Ether 2:23 is said to be anachronistic, since glass windows were not invented until the late Middle Ages. Actually, the earliest attestations of glass are from the eighth century B.C. But the term “window” originally referred to an opening through which the wind could enter. It is found 42 times in the Bible where, of course, it does not refer to glass windows, as we know them. In 2 Kings 13:17 we read that a window in the palace was opened, so windows sometimes had doors or shutters. The same is true of the “window” that Noah built into the ark.

It seems likely that Ether 2:23 means not that the windows in the Jaredite barges would break, but that the barges themselves, would break if they had windows built into them. This, the Lord explains in the next verse, is because they would go through extremely turbulent conditions at sea, sometimes being buried beneath the waves. Windows would mean additional cuts through the wood that, even if shuttered, would weaken the wooden structure, making it more fragile and thus liable to be “dashed in pieces.” If we read only the sentence containing the word “windows” and read it out of context, then the antecedent of “they” would, indeed, be “windows.” But it is probable that the antecedent is “vessels,” the last word in the preceding sentence.

Another criticism is that the Book of Mormon speaks of candles, which did not exist in ancient America. The term “candle” is frequently used in the King James Bible, where the original refers to an oil lamp. Candles were not in use in the Holy Land in Bible times. Instead, they used oil lamps, which were less known in seventeenth-century England. The Book of Mormon, which Joseph Smith translated into English, was evidently deliberately made to sound like the KJV language, which people of his day associated with scriptures. Consequently, he also used the term “candle.”

A Horse is a Horse, of Course

One of the most common criticisms against the Book of Mormon is that it says there were horses in America during both Jaredite and Nephite times, but scholars are agreed that horses were not introduced to the Americas until after the arrival of the Spaniards. However, the paucity of skeletal remains cannot be taken as evidence that there were no horses. Though the Huns were renowned horsemen of the middle ages, no single horse bone has been found in the territory they controlled. Though the Bible mentions lions in the Holy Land, and despite the fact that archaeologists had been working there since 1864, it was not until 1983 that the remains of two lions were found in Israel, with no others being discovered since. Another factor that must be considered is that the animal bones found by archaeologists are almost always of animals consumed by the ancient inhabitants of a site. Since the horse (and the lion, for that matter) was considered an “unclean” animal by the Law of Moses, one should not expect to find it at a site occupied by the Nephites. When an animal that is not eaten dies in a human habitation, the people would remove it from town, so its bones would not be found in sites of interest to archaeologists.

There are other good explanations for the Book of Mormon horses, but the point I make here is that the Bible was, for centuries, in the same position as the Book of Mormon in regard to the existence of lions in the Holy Land.