Steel does not spring back when you bend it, therefore a steel would be the most stupid thing one could use to make a bow from. Think about it, at the height of the middle ages, when knights were riding into battle, dressed in head to toe in steel armor, they were being shot at by bows made from ash or yew, not steel. If a steel bow was somehow superior to a wooden one, then that is what they would have been using.

Smith on the other hand, not only declares that Nephi hunted with a steel bow, but claims that he cleverly figures out how to use wood to replace the damn thing, when it breaks, as if making a bow out of wood is a revolutionary concept.

Let me explain what is going on here. At this time in upstate New York, firearms had been the dominant form of missile weapons for probably a hundred plus years. Native Americans were probably the only ones to have used bows, and they would have been pushed out of the area decades before Smith was born. Even then, flintlocks were probably the weapon of choice for most native warriors. Bow hunting as a sport, would not become popular for white men until near the end of the 19th century, and even then, it would have a limited following. Smith was simply ignorant about bow and arrow technology.

Only someone ignorant of how bows work would think that you could make one from steel. An ancient Israelite who hunted with bows, hundreds of years before steel could be reliably made, would never have bothered mentioning the idea of steel bows.

Hell, there was even a BYU engineer contest several years ago, where engineering students tried to make steel bows. While some where able to make something that kind of worked, none were able to come up with something that would have been possible to build a hundred years ago, little loan six hundred years before Christ, and again, none of their pathetic attempts came close to being as good as a wooden bow.

http://me.byu.edu/news/modern-nephites-engineering-students-build-steel-bows-shooting-competition?destination=node%2F177

The winning bow fired 540 feet. Almost 2 football fields. Not exactly chopped liver.

There are different alloys of steel, with different properties. Spring steel would be used in a bow, but not for armor. Leaf springs and coil springs are made of steel, and swords and knives are made from modified spring steel, which is both hard and flexible, but resistant to deformational bending.

The most famous sword steel is Damascus steel, which dates back to about 500 BCE, so Nephi having a steel bow is not completely impossible from a technology point of view, at least in theory. I doubt there was ever even an attempt to make a steel bow until the late Middle Ages. Wood is far more practical. Lighter, and it doesn't rust, plus it grows on trees!

However, the real answer is that "steel" really means "fire-hardened wood". Just ask FAIR. :)


Steel swords are still used as ceremonial weapons, and we still mount horses from the left side, so that the sword, worn on the left hip, does not get in the way when throwing the leg over the horse. Sort of the human equivalent of a dog turning around several times to crush the grass before lying down, even though it is now sleeping on carpet.

Bows, otoh, are not used as ceremonial weapons, but modern bow technology is quite sophisticated, and a modern hunting bow would have been impossible to make even 50 years ago. Swords look cool. Bows work cool.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/2013 06:57AM by Brother Of Jerry.

Read the comic "Dilbert" today. Perfect cog dis example.

How the hell do you break a steel bow? (To replace it with wood.)

My pole is chromed steel. It can hold three women, without bending or moving at all.

Joseph Smith was relying on the KJV of the Bible for the bow of steel (and the idea of breaking it). My understanding is that "steel" is a mistranslation in these verses, and that the original Hebrew actually refers to bronze (if memory serves).


Job 20:24 He shall flee from the iron weapon, and the bow of steel shall strike him through.

2 Samuel 22:35 He teacheth my hands to war; so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms.

Psalms 18:34 He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel is broken by mine arms.

As I noted below, the apologists have resorted to insisting Nephi built a new one and claimed it was of wood...

Now pardon me, I need a shower after reading some Michael Ash silliness on the subject.

Arrow?

I guess one could beat their enemy to death with a steel bow...

As to it being a mistranslation...I don't think so. Remember, this is the most correct book on earth. Perfectly translated.

Yeah, something like that.

It is a mistranslation in the KJV. Actually it was probably one the arrow tip which was bronze. More reusable and probably a bit better than stone.

I'm not sure what to think about this:

http://trib.com/lifestyles/home-and-garden/historic-wyoming-steel-bow-s-origins-confound-researchers/article_31118e0d-a2f7-5dfb-b2cd-64c08399ff4b.html

Are they sure that is a bow? It seems more likely that it is a twisted metal part that went to something else, like a train. Also, it appears modern. You can tell because it isn't a rusted piece of hulk pulled from the ground.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/2013 10:12AM by forbiddencokedrinker.

It says it's about 150 years old making it from the 1800's not 600 BC

Early Mormon believer decides if it was good enough for Nephi, it was good enough for him.

That is my thought also. An early mormon in the area decided to try and make one.

Richard the Bad Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm not sure what to think about this:
>
> http://trib.com/lifestyles/home-and-garden/histori
> c-wyoming-steel-bow-s-origins-confound-researchers
> /article_31118e0d-a2f7-5dfb-b2cd-64c08399ff4b.html

The centre portion where you would actually hold the bow is too small. You'd have to have a child sized hand to grip it.

I used to shoot (decades ago with a composite wood/fiberglass recurve, and the consensus was for accuracy to shoot with the bow braced against the heel of the hand with the fingers open....The index and middle fingers functioned as a "bow sight," and once the arrow was released the bow was just gripped lightly...

Ah, here we go...

http://media.photobucket.com/user/sailgirl_4ever/media/Untitled.png.html?filters[term]=archery&filters[primary]=images&filters[secondary]=videos&sort=1&o=14&_suid=138081871028207537772017531097

You'll have to copy-and-past that link because it's long, but it demonstrates what I'm talking about...

Gripping a bow tightly while shooting is going to lead to fatigue...

If steel made good bows, they would be doing that now. I don't remember an era of bow-making in modern times where steel was used at all.. they went right from wood to fiberglass and then to carbon fiber, etc.

Making the kind of steel that would be even partially suitable for a bow is very advanced technology. It would be preceded by extensive use and making of lesser steels. Iron and steel making causes indelible remains, as it is very messy. There aren't any of these signs in the new world previous to the Columbian Exchange. Therefore, I call BS. Sorry, Joe Smith... You are a fraud.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/2013 03:21PM by rationalist01.

Ever hear of 'spring steel'!?

Ever hear of metallurgy? Spring steel wouldn't have been around until much after regular steel came about, and regular steel wasn't available for a very long time. The stuff that they found from the bronze age was probably glorified pig iron at best.

some LDS believe that the ancients had iron which we know today as steel.

a while back... Nova had a program about how people made sturdy steel implements Long Before 'modern' methods were invented.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-samurai-sword.html

swords... I get it; Bows, Not So Much.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/26/2013 11:43PM by guynoirprivateeye.

Those swords were very high tech. They were composite.. the body made of tough, non-brittle metal and the edge of harder material. A bow would be an entirely different process, it would have to be spring steel. Springs can be made by hardening and tempering carbon steel, but springs that weren't subject to embrittlement and metal fatigue had to wait for advanced alloy metallurgy. Some of this technology wasn't developed until well into the machine age. Valve springs were a limiting factor for the speed of gasoline engines well into the 20th century.

It may have been possible to make carbon spring steel as early as when Nephi supposedly lived.. but it would have left good evidence. Mere pig iron is the first step, and that leaves evidence, like charcoal,stone furnaces an slag dumps. No such furnaces from that era have ever been found in the New World.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/27/2013 01:04AM by rationalist01.

I looked at this one a few years ago when I was researching the claims of the "hyper-diffusionists.The early process didn't involve melting iron (which results in the brittle alloy we know as "pig iron" from which cast iron is usually made), but rather a process involving a "sponge" and "bloom," terms used to describe the intermittent stage before the impurities are driven out during the forging process.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/10/051011073801.htm

>Bloomery furnaces smelt iron in a direct reduction process, where the iron never becomes liquid. If the furnace gets too hot and the iron liquefies, it picks up a lot of carbon and becomes cast iron, which is too brittle to be worked into tools, swords and other objects that require a more flexible metal.

>The furnace produces a "bloom," which is like a big sponge, with a network of glass-filled channels running through it. The iron has loosely bonded together, leaving the glass that was produced from all the impurities in the iron ore.

>After the bloom is produced, a blacksmith starts working it while it is still hot, repeatedly hammering and reshaping it to drive the glass out, leaving the iron. With just a little manipulation, the iron is good enough for tools, although they might break easily where large glass inclusions make them weak. With lots of hammering, shaping and reheating, the blooms can be formed into the fine steel found in samurai swords, for instance.

What is worth noting is that many LDS apologists have resorted to linguistic legerdemain in claiming JS "didn't mean steel" when he said "steel."

The BOM is a 19th Century fraud, period. DNA science has demonstrated that one irrevocably, as has the archaeological evidence (or rather lack of); it offers a racist message that denigrates Native Americans and their cultures and civilizations, and common sense makes one wonder at the mental gyrations used to "evaluate" this sort of romantic shinola.

I don't know what is sadder: the pedantry of this thread or the fact I'm posting in it.

The world if full of steel springs. A steel bow isn't an impossibility, just another JS anachronism.

Cross bows had a spring steel bow. 200 yrs ago +

Also try a sword with a hilt of pure gold. And if one tries to argue it was ornamental it was used by cot Moroni in battle.

You can pick apart Joe's book and sort of rationalize how one particular detail could work by theorizing a lot of what-ifs. The trouble is, there are many, many unlikely things. Multiply things together that each have a probability less than one. The result is a very small number, indicating that the stories put together have an infinitesimal chance of being factual.