What Most Readers Miss About the Sword of Laban - Informed Saints | Lyssna här

Critics once called the Book of Mormon's weapons a fatal flaw — steel swords in 600 BC? Scimitars a thousand years before Muhammad? Bows and arrows in ancient America? Then archaeology started coming into play.

In this episode, Jasmin Rappleye, Neal Rappleye, and Stephen Smoot dig into Matthew Roper's Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence for the Book of Mormon, published through the Interpreter Foundation — an exhaustive documentation of weapons critics once claimed couldn't have existed.

===Informed Saints Credits===

Produced by The Ancient America Foundation

Producer: Spencer Clark

Hosts: Stephen Smoot, Neal Rappleye, Jasmin Rappleye

In this episode:

Roper's scorecard: 12 of 15 allegedly anachronistic weapons now confirmed, 2 partially confirmed
The sword of Laban (1 Nephi 4) and the critics — Clark Braden (1884), a 1964 Notre Dame Press book, Walter Martin's Kingdom of the Cults (1997) — who insisted steel didn't exist in Nephi's day
The meter-long steel sword discovered by Avraham Eitan at a fortress near Jericho, dated to the late 7th century BC
King Tut's meteoric-iron, gold-hilted dagger and other gold-hilted weapons of the ancient Near East
Why "steel" in the Book of Ether may reflect layers of translation — and why the King James Bible renders Hebrew bronze as "steel"
The macuahuitl: the obsidian-edged Mesoamerican sword conquistadors said cut better than Spanish steel (Ross Hassig, Michael Coe) — going back to Olmec San Lorenzo
Scimitars from Enos to the Egyptian khopesh, the Hebrew kidon, Goliath's weapons in 1 Samuel 17, and curved blades on the Lachish reliefs
Curved blades in the New World: Tonina, Teotihuacan, and San Lorenzo
Nephi's steel bow, the "bow of steel" of 2 Samuel 22:35 / Psalm 18, and composite bows with metal fittings
Bows, arrows, and atlatls in ancient Mesoamerica — and what a 2005 Copán study changed