The Beheading of Shiz

At the conclusion of the final Jaredite battle, two opposing military leaders, Coriantumr and Shiz, were the last combatants who hadn’t “fallen by the sword” (Ether 15:29).¹ Coriantumr had the advantage, however, seeing that “Shiz had fainted with the loss of blood” (v. 29). Ether reports that “when Coriantumr had leaned upon his sword, that he rested a little, he smote off the head of Shiz” (v. 30). Then a rather unusual detail is reported: “And it came to pass that after he had smitten off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised up on his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died” (v. 31).

A man struggling for breath without a head is hard to imagine (and most people would not want to), yet Dr. M. Gary Hadfield, a professor of neuropathology, has discovered a possible medical explanation for this strange event. Hadfield noted that “Coriantumr was obviously too exhausted to do a clean job. His stroke evidently strayed a little too high. He must have cut off Shiz’s head through the base of the skull, at the level of the midbrain.”² The suggestion that Coriantumr’s exhaustion may have affected his physical strength and accuracy is supported by the fact that afterwards he himself “fell to the earth, and became as if he had no life” (Ether 15:32).

Hadfield further explained, “Shiz’s death struggle illustrates the classic reflex ... when the upper brain stem ... is disconnected from the brain.”³ Certain muscles in the arms and legs contract, and this could have caused Shiz to raise up on his hands. This also explains why Shiz “struggle[d] for breath” (Ether 15:31). Such a botched decapitation “would also cause his rib cage to expand and contract automatically, as it does in all of us when we are sleeping.”⁴ This would have made it sound like Shiz was struggling to breathe. This type of neural phenomenon was first reported in 1898, many years after the publication of the Book of Mormon.⁵

Hadfield noted that “the event obviously astonished both Ether and Moroni, who chronicled it.”⁶ This is likely why they both would have felt compelled to include it. Even though Moroni would have been familiar with war and the head-injuries that go with it, he still “singled out this extraordinary occurrence to include in his abridgement. Perhaps Ether and Moroni had concluded that Shiz’s last-minute ‘pushup,’ ... was due to an unconquerable spirit, an unwillingness to die.”⁷

It may also be noteworthy that heads and beheadings played an important role in ancient Mesoamerican ritual and warfare. For instance, large monuments in the shape of human heads are a well-known feature of the Olmec civilization, which some scholars have correlated with the Jaredites.⁸ According to Christopher L. Moser, “It is probable that these [monuments] demonstrate the early importance of the human head as an object for representing and honoring great rulers and ancestors.”⁹ This assumption is supported by various depictions of decapitations found in Mesoamerican artwork (in both ritual and warfare contexts) from the Formative period.¹⁰ In such a cultural environment, the beheading of Shiz would likely have been seen as a deeply symbolic—rather than just incidental—conclusion to a cataclysmic military conflict, which may help explain why the event was reported in the first place.

M. Gary Hadfield, “The ‘Decapitation’ of Shiz,” in Pressing Forward with the Book of Mormon: The FARMS Updates of the 1990s, ed. John W. Welch and Melvin J. Thorne (Provo UT: FARMS, 1999), 266–268.

M. Gary Hadfield, “Neuropathology and the Scriptures,” BYU Studies 33, no. 2 (1993): 313–328.

Ether 15:29–32

Ether 15:29–32