Metals of the Book of Mormon The ancient Near East knew six metals—gold, silver, copper, iron, lead, and tin—and only one fabricated alloy—bronze (Interpreter’s, 3:366; Num. 32:22; Ezek. 22:20). Nephi1 taught his people to work iron, copper, brass, gold, and silver, and apparently steel as well (2 Ne. 5:15).

Copper, bronze, and brass

Copper occurs in nature as a native metal; however, most copper in antiquity was smelted from secondary blue and green copper carbonates like malachite. Bronze, the copper-tin alloy, was known as early as 3000 B.C. and was the metal of choice for much of ancient Near East history. Brass, the copper-zinc alloy, was not introduced into the Holy Land as a deliberate alloy before the first century B.C. (Tylecote, 58).

The ancient Hebrew word nechosheth and the Greek chalkos may be translated either “copper” or “bronze” (Brown, 230-31). In the language of Tudor England, “brass” denoted any copper alloy and was derived from the Old English word braes (Interpreter’s, 1:461; New Standard, 576). The word bronze did not come into use until the eighteenth century and does not appear in the Book of Mormon or the King James Version of the Bible, although it is common in other Bible translations. As Joseph Smith was very familiar with the King James Bible and Lehi1 left Jerusalem before copper-zinc alloys were fabricated in the Near East, it appears likely that the “brass” objects in the Book of Mormon were either copper or bronze. The “brass” plates of Laban may have been copper, as copper is more malleable than bronze, and the Liahona, which was of supernatural origin, was made of some material that Nephi chose to call “fine brass.”

Iron and steel

By Nephi’s time, Canaan had entered the Iron Age (Tylecote, 40), and Nephi must have brought with him a few iron and steel objects (e.g., Laban’s sword and Nephi’s bow) as well as a knowledge of smelting. When commanded to make tools for ship building, Nephi asked help to find ore but seemed to know how to proceed from there (1 Ne. 17:8-11). A simple fire pit furnace, even with bellows, cannot melt iron, but yields iron “bloom” by the reduction of iron oxide ores. This spongy mass of tiny iron crystals is forced to “wrought iron” with hammer and anvil after the manner of the western pioneer blacksmiths. Wrought iron may become steel by “carburizing” in the same pit furnace (Phillips, 41). This technology was well known in Jerusalem by 600 B.C.

The earlier Jaredite record makes reference to “iron” (Ether 7:9), and Jared1’s great-grandson Shule was said to be a maker of steel swords (Ether 7:9). Because Jared and his brother departed the Near East at the time of the great tower and the confounding of languages (Ether 1:33), the record implies a date for iron and steel centuries before the Hittites of Asia Minor introduced iron in the second millennium B.C. As archaeologists have found no artifacts of smelted iron in the New world earlier than the Spanish conquest (Tylecote, ix) and the Spanish found Mesoamerica in a pre-bronze age (Tylecote, 12), it seems likely that (1) the knowledge of iron and steel smelting and working was known to the Book of Mormon peoples and subsequently lost; (2) the terms “iron” and “steel” in the Book of Mormon do not denote the same metals identified by those names today; (3) archaeological evidence is incomplete. All of these choices are probably true to some degree (Lechtman, 1).

Gold and silver

Nephi stated that the “promised land” yielded “all manner of ore, both of gold, and of silver, and of copper” (1 Ne. 18;23, 25), which is consistent with the NEW WORLD wealth found by Spanish conquistadors and by modern miners of the American cordillera. The metals designated “gold” and “silver” should be unambiguous. Both may occur as native metals which can be worked directly and, along with copper, are malleable, making them the metals of choice for the pages of ancient records because they could be pounded to very thin sheets (Tylecote, 37). Great intrinsic value make gold and silver the obvious choice for barter and, as the standard of wealth and prosperity, they repeatedly led to pride and apostasy in the narrative.

Ziff

The word ziff appears only twice in the Book of Mormon (Mosiah 11:3, 8), and as it occurs in a list of metals, it is usually assumed to be a metal. The only known metals not considered above are tine and lead. Ziff could be either or some other alloy, but lead is most likely as it is common and easily recovered from galena (PbS), which is also the principal source of silver.