The hill Ephraim is the location that king Shule "did moulten out of the hill, and made swords out of steel" (Ether 7:9). The inclusion of this particular incident in the Jaredite record is quite curious. Warfare occurred prior to this time among the Jaredites. The rest of the history of the Jaredites indicates regular, periodic warfare, and swords are also periodically mentioned. However, nowhere else it is mentioned that any other Jaredite swords were made of steel. The mentioning of this fact takes on increased meaning when one considers that Ether was in direct line to Shule and the right to kingship from Ether's father, which was from Coriantor, who lived in captivity, and his grandfather Moron, who was deposed form the throne by a competing line from the brother of Jared (Ether 11:17-23) (see figure 97).

Why are steel swords uniquely manufactured at this point in the Jaredite narrative? And how does the manufacture of such swords relate to metallurgy among the Olmec?

Consistent with the Jaredite geography discussed previously, the location where Shule found himself in the Tuxtlas did not contain any natural sources of obsidian (Santley 2007, 127), and since he was an outcast to the kingdom controlled by his enemy, he may not have had any access to obsidian by means of trade. While perhaps counterintuitive, some volcanoes, such as those in the Tuxtlas, are virtually devoid of obsidian as it only forms in eruptions where the cooling of the appropriate volcanic material is rapid, avoiding the formation of crystals. Shule thus had to make to with that he had to create sufficient weapons to retake the kingdom, which may have added to his mythological status.

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No other references to swords in the book of Ether identify the swords (or any other weapon) as steel, so the identification of the swords of Shule as made form steel could be best interpreted as an anomaly. There is no mention of steel in later references to metals that the Jaredites had (Ether 9:17, Ether 10:7, Ether 10:12, Ether 10:23). In fact, given the fact that these swords were part of a Jaredite sacred bundle, the story of Shule seems to have an almost mythological element to it (forming metallic swords of a volcano). The genesis of the swords and their singular uniqueness would be why the swords would be included in the sacred bundle, so there would be little expectation that other metallic, or at least steel, swords were present anywhere else in Jaredite history.

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The language used here to "moulten out of the hill" does not imply any sort of mining. In the context of a volcano, it seems to indicate that the molten material from the hill was utilized in some fashion to make the swords. Meteoric iron (derived from meteorites) was already used before the beginning of the Iron Age to make cultural objects, tools, and weapons (Waldbaum 1980). Since Shule was only four generations removed from the arrival of the Jaredites, it is possible that there was still some retention of iron metal working. The edge of obsidian is much sharper than metal weaponry, so given the availability of obsidian in Mesoamerica, a low quality steel weapon would not be an advantage.

Basaltic lava can range in temperature from 1,832 to 2,282 degrees in Fahrenheit. Anciently, iron was not smelted or cast. The earliest known examples of casting liquefied iron are from China in the fourth century B.C. The melting point of iron is 2,800 degrees of Fahrenheit, so it would not be expected that there was any sort of smelting going on with regard to Shule.