Evidence #97 | September 19, 2020
Book of Mormon Evidence: Cimeters
Post contributed by
Scripture Central
Abstract
On several occasions, the Book of Mormon refers to a weapon called a “cimeter.” Once thought to be an anachronism, it is now known that this weapon was used in both the Old World and the New, in both biblical and Book of Mormon times.On several occasions, the Book of Mormon refers to a weapon called a cimeter,1 which is an older spelling for scimitar, a curved sword that usually has a cutting edge on the convex or outer side. Some readers have claimed that the term cimeter is out of place in the Book of Mormon.2 This is largely due to the widespread belief that scimitars (cimeters) were not invented until after the rise of Islam (ca. 7th century AD)—much too late to have been used by the Nephites. However, it is now known that this weapon, in various forms, was known in both the Old World and the New, in both biblical and Book of Mormon times.
Scimitars are depicted in the ancient Near East as early as 2000 BC,3 and according to one scholar they may have been the more common sword in ancient Israel. Thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars now know that the Hebrew term kidon refers to a scimitar.4 In 1 Samuel 17:45, when David faced Goliath, he declared, “You come against me with a sword [hereb] and spear [hanit] and scimitar [kidon], but I come against you with the name of Yahweh Sabaoth, god of the ranks of Israel” (1 Samuel 17:45).5 Some writers have thought it strange that the Lamanite chieftain Zerahemnah would carry both a sword and a cimeter (Alma 44:8), but as Paul Hoskisson has observed, the biblical text says the same about Goliath.6
Weapons which can accurately be called scimitars were also used in ancient America. These curved swords were designed for slashing and typically consisted of a flat hard wooden base approximately 50 centimeters (20 inches) long, into which obsidian blades were set along both edges.7 Once thought to be a post-Classic invention (ca. AD 900–1500),8 evidence now dates these weapons to Classic (AD 300–900) and even pre-Classic times (1500 BC–AD 300).9
For example, a monument dating to AD 613 from Tonina, Mexico shows a noble posing with a curved “scimitar-like flint blade.”10 Long, curved scimitar-like daggers are portrayed in the hands of warriors at Teotihuacan, ca. AD 450.11 Ann Cyphers, the leading archaeologist at San Lorenzo (ca. 1500–900 BC), observed that one monument displays a weapon that “has a curved body with eleven triangular elements encrusted in the sides.”12 Another monument at the same site displays “an object in the form of a curved macana with 14 triangular points” including one on the tip.13
Book of Mormon Central, “Why Does the Book of Mormon Mention Cimeters? (Mosiah 9:16),” KnoWhy 472 (October 2, 2018).
Matthew Roper, “To Inflict the Wounds of Death,” FairMormon Presentation 2016, online at fairmormon.org.
Matthew Roper, “Mesoamerican ‘Cimeters’ in Book of Mormon Times,” Insights: The Newsletter of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship 28, no. 1 (2008): 2.
Matthew Roper, “Swords and ‘Cimeters’ in the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 8, no. 1 (1999): 35–43.
Paul Y. Hoskisson, “Scimitars, Cimeters! We have scimilars! Do we need another cimeter?” in Warfare in the Book of Mormon, ed. Stephen D. Ricks and William J. Hamblin (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1990), 352–359.
William J. Hamblin and A. Brent Merrill, “Notes on the Cimeter (Scimitar) in the Book of Mormon,” in Warfare in the Book of Mormon, ed. Stephen D. Ricks and William J. Hamblin (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1990), 360–364.
- 1. See Enos 1:20; Mosiah 9:16; Alma 27:29; Alma 44:8.
- 2. See, for example, John Hyde Jr., Mormonism: Its Leaders and Designs (1857), 234–235; Samuel Hawthornthwaite, Adventures Among the Mormons (1857), 69; W. E. Riter to James E. Talmage, 22 August, 1921, in Brigham D. Madsen, ed., B. H. Roberts, Studies of the Book of Mormon (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 35–37; Gordon Fraser, Joseph Smith and the Golden Plates (1964), 58; James Spencer, The Disappointment of B.H. Roberts (1991), 4; Earl Wunderli, An Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us About Itself (2013), 36; John Christopher Thomas, A Pentecostal Reads the Book of Mormon (Cleveland, TN: CPT Press, 2016), 420.
- 3. See Yigael Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 1:10–11, 78–79, 172, 204– 207; William J. Hamblin, Warfare in the Ancient Near East to 1600 BC. (London and New York: Rutledge, 2006), 66–71, 279–280.
- 4. Paul Y. Hoskisson, “Scimitars, Cimeters! We have scimitars! Do we need another cimeter?” in Warfare in the Book of Mormon, ed. Stephen D. Ricks and William J. Hamblin (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1990), 352–359; G. Molin, “What is a Kidon?” Journal of Semitic Studies 1 (1956): 334–337, esp. 336; Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel (New York and Toronto: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 1:242.
- 5. See P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., 1 Samuel (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 285.
- 6. Hoskisson, “Scimitars, Cimeters!” 355.
- 7. According to Ross Hassig, “It was an excellent slasher and yet the forward curve of the sword retained some aspects of a crusher when used curved end forward.” Ross Hassig, War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1992), 113.
- 8. Hassig, War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica, 112–113.
- 9. Matthew Roper, “Swords and ‘Cimeters’ in the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 8, no. 1 (1999): 35–40.
- 10. Mary Miller and Simon Martin, Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya (New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 188, plate 106. A figurine now displayed in the Museo Regional de Campeche, which likely dates from the same period, portrays a warrior wearing a death mask who grasps an unhappy captive in his right hand and a curved weapon in his raised left hand with which he is about to decapitate his victim. The weapon in the figure’s left hand has been called an ax by some scholars, but given its curved form it could just as well be a scimitar. See Linda Schele, Hidden Faces of the Maya (1997), 100–101.
- 11. See Arthur G. Miller, The Mural Painting of Teotihuacan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1973), 85, 116, 162.
- 12. Ann Cyphers, Escultura Olmeca de San Lorenzo Tenochtilan (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2004), 145, talking about Monument 78.
- 13. Cyphers, Escultura Olmeca de San Lorenzo Tenochtilan, 159. Monument 112 portrays a figure with a curved dagger in his belt (p. 190, figure 26).