The brother of Jared went to the Lord with his concern about the lack of light in the barges. The Lord did not provide an immediate solution to the problem, but asked, “What will ye that I should do that ye may have light in your vessels?” (Ether 2:23). In response, the brother of Jared “did molten out of rock sixteen small stones; and they were white and clear, even as transparent glass” (Ether 6:3). He then went back to the Lord and asked the Lord to touch each stone, which caused them to “shine in darkness, to give light unto men, women, and children, that they might not cross the great waters in darkness” (Ether6:3).
Referencing this account, Hugh Nibley asked, “[W]ho gave the brother of Jared the idea about stones in the first place? It was not the Lord, who left him entirely on his own; and yet the man went right to work as if he knew exactly what he was doing. Who put him on to it?”
Nibley acknowledged that the brother of Jared’s shining stones narrative “has been the subject of much mockery and fun among the critics of the Book of Mormon.” However, both Nibley and John A. Tvedtnes have found that there is a substantial body of ancient literature that contain legends and histories of stones that provided light. Tvedtnes noted, “The account of the stones used to provide light in the Jaredite barges fits rather well into a larger corpus of ancient and medieval literature.” These texts from antiquity were unknown in the world during Joseph Smith’s time or were unavailable to Smith.
One ancient account was of Alexander the Great, who was said to have a stone—a jewel that would glow. He carried it under his belt until he lost it in the Euphrates. Even Aristotle (Alexander’s tutor) mentioned Alexander’s stone.
Of greater relevance to the Jaredite record, are the accounts linking shining stones to Noah’s ark. The story of Noah and the flood would have been relatively recent history for the Jaredites, who had departed from the “great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people” (Ether 1:33). An ancient glowing stone known as the “Pyrophilus” and other examples of luminous stones appear in various ancient texts, such as in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Nibley noted, “The Pyrophilus legend, wherever it is found, has accordingly been traced back ultimately in every case to the story of Noah.”
Lucian of Samosata related the story of a temple in Syria where throngs of pilgrims were shown a hole in the ground where they believed the waters of the flood receded. This Syrian temple had a stone, known as the “lynchnis,” that shone brightly at night, but not in the day. The lynchnis illuminated the whole sanctuary to simulate how Noah could tell how many days had passed during his voyage.
In the Babylonian Talmud, a Jewish commentator reported that the Lord instructed Noah to “set therein precious stones and jewels, so that they may give thee light, bright as the noon.” Another ancient Jewish rabbi explained, “During the whole twelve months that Noah was in the Ark he did not require the light of the sun by day or light of the moon by night, but he had a polished gem which he hung up.” Shaul Yosef Leiter, in a weekly Torah message, explained that the Torah description of the ark construction in Genesis 6:16 used the Hebrew word “tzohar,” meaning “something that shines.” In the Jerusalem Talmud, there are extensive debates about whether this “tzohar” was a window or a shining stone.
These various Jewish accounts of a shining stone being used in Noah’s ark are of particular interest, considering that Ether 6:7 made a direct comparison between the Jaredite vessels and Noah’s ark: “[T]here was no water that could hurt them, their vessels being tight like unto a dish, and also they were tight like unto the ark of Noah.”
Hugh Nibley gave the following summary:
Now whether the ark of Noah was actually lit by shining stones or not is beside the point, which is that the idea of stones shining in the darkness of the ark was not invented by Joseph Smith or anybody else in the nineteenth century, but [1] was known to the ancient rabbis in an obscure and garbled version, [2] was clearly indicated in the properties of a very ancient shrine dedicated to the Syrian Noah, and [3] was mixed in among the legends of the very ancient Alexander cycle by means of which scholars quickly and easily ran it down to its oldest visible source, namely the old Sumerian Epic of the Babylonian Noah. However ridiculous the story of the shining stones may sound to modern ears, there is no doubt that it is [genuinely ancient], going back to the proper sources as far as Ether is concerned. (Numbering added for clarity.)
Far from being an amusing creation of Joseph Smith, the shining stones are features of ancient texts that were not known in Smith’s place and time.
Book of Mormon Central, “Where did the Brother of Jared Get the Idea of Shining Stones? (Ether 6:3),” KnoWhy 240 (November 28, 2016).
Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, 1st edition (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret Book, 1957), chapter 25, pp. 288–298. Nibley, Hugh W., “There Were Jaredites - The Shining Stones – Continued.” Improvement Era 59, no. 9 (1956): 630–632, 672–675.
Hugh Nibley, An Approach to the Book of Mormon, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 6 (Salt Lake City and Provo, UT: Deseret Book and FARMS, 1988), 285, 337–358.
John A. Tvedtnes, “Glowing Stones in Ancient and Medieval Lore,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 6, no. 2 (1997): 99–123.