“I Did Arm Them with Bows And with all Manner of Weapons”

Brant Gardner

The catalog of Nephite weapons has already been discussed (see commentary accompanying Enos 1:21), but this verse mentions “all manner of weapons which we could invent.” Did the Zeniffites literally create hitherto unknown weapons? While necessity certainly breeds inventiveness, it does not necessarily lead to completely new weapons. Note the conditions of technological inferiority England faced in the 1620s:

Military practice had changed substantially during the 16th and early 17th centuries to the degree that some historians describe those changes as the “military revolution.” Pike-trailers such as Sir Roger Williams, author of A Briefe Discourse of Warre (1590), warned Englishmen that they were failing to keep up with the latest technical and tactical innovations. By the time Charles I plunged into the Thirty Years’ War… the gulf had widened between contemporary European military science and the English art of war.

The resolution of the need for modernized weaponry was not adoption of the same gunpowder-based weapons as other European nations, but rather innovations on the traditional English long bow. In like way, it is improbable that the Zeniffite people had the caliber of military genius required to invent entirely new weapons. It seems more likely that they manufactured weapons they knew about but did not previously possess (or, at least, had only one or two examples of). Up to this time the main Zeniffite activity seems to have been restoring buildings and working hard to maintain a prosperous system of agriculture. Some support for the idea of “manufacturing” weapons with which to repel an imminent attack comes from Mosiah 10:1: “We again began to establish the kingdom and we again began to possess the land in peace. And I caused that there should be weapons of war made of every kind, that thereby I might have weapons for my people against the time the Lamanites should come up again to war against my people.”

Second Witness: Analytical & Contextual Commentary on the Book of Mormon, Vol. 3

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