In Ether 7:9 we find the statement that Shule "made swords out of steel." According to Hugh Nibley, a few years ago much objection was made to the careless references in Jaredite history to iron and steel in an age when iron and steel were supposedly undreamed of. Today the protest must be rather feeble. . . A Mesopotamian knife blade "not of meteoric origin" and set in a handle has been dated with certainty to the twenty-eighth century B.C.; iron from the Great Pyramid goes back to 2900 B.C. and "might have been smelted from an ore." . . .
If we move farther east, into the region in which the Jaredites took their rise, we find the manufacture of iron so far advanced by the Amarna period that the local monarch can send to the king of Egypt two splendid daggers "whose blade is of khabalkinu," the word being usually translated as "steel." [Hugh Nibley, The World of the Jaredites, p. 215]
According to William Hamblin and Brent Merrill, in light of contemporary conditions in Mesoamerica, one can understand [the mention of "swords . . . of steel"] in a number of ways. Although the blades of most macuahuitls in Mesoamerica were made from obsidian, the Aztecs are known to have had war clubs studded with iron instead of the usual obsidian. . . . Various types of material, including iron, replaced the usual obsidian of the macuahuitl, and such a weapon could thus be described as a sword with a metal "blade." Another possibility is to equate this Jaredite steel with the "steel" of the King James translation of the Old Testament, which actually refers to the Hebrew word for "bronze." [William J. Hamblin and A. Brent Merrill, "Swords in the Book of Mormon," in Warfare in the Book of Mormon, pp. 346-347]
According to John Sorenson, steel in the Book of Mormon is a complex problem. Hugh Nibley has discussed how uncertain we remain about what might be meant by "steel" in ancient Old World texts. In Mexico we face similar obscurity. The native chronicler Tezozomoc reported that the Tarascans (Mesoamerica's most noted metallurgists at the time of the Spanish conquest) wore "steel" helmets. Was he telling the "truth"? Should we favor historical accounts over archaeological finds? Caley and Easby address this argument, but in regards to pre-Columbian tin in Mexico. After demonstrating that specimens of metal were there all the time despite the doubts of archaeologists, who had failed to examine the evidence, they end by observing, "The results also show that it is not prudent always to discount or ignore historical accounts as possible sources of technical information; some of the 16th century chroniclers apparently were wiser and more observant in such matters than many of their critics." Perhaps the Jaredite historian who talked of steel (Ether 7:9) and Tezozomoc with his steel helmets on the Tarascans both knew something that archaeologists will yet document. [John L. Sorenson, An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon, p. 287]