If the scenes of the Book of Mormon were portrayed in a motion picture, the film would have to be rated “R” for violence. The reason we have such a graphic representation of the final battle is because of Ether, who did behold all the doings of the people (v. 13). We imagine him perched in some inconspicuous location, viewing the entire bloody conflict as the only innocent bystander. For two days of the last week of fighting, he gives us a body count, not of the casualties, but of the survivors (vs. 23,25).
The whole ugly scene concludes in an incredulous decapitation. While one might wonder how a beheaded body could extend its arms and struggle for breath, the reader is reminded of the behavior of the proverbial chicken who runs and flaps well after losing its head. Now Shiz was no chicken, but the concept of body movements after decapitation is not unheard of. A brief review of the current medical literature shows scores of articles which study the effects of certain neurologically active drugs on decapitation convulsions which predictably happen in mice and rats (e.g. “The effect of 5,6 dihydroxytryptamine on decapitation convulsions,” Life Sci. 1977 Nov 15;21:1475-82) . Certainly, Shiz’ body movements were the result of brief muscle spasms—a rare but real form of human decapitation convulsions.
B.H. Roberts
"It is claimed that this represents an impossible thing--a man with his head stricken off rising upon his hands! And yet equally marvelous things of this nature have occurred, and are matters of record.
"Mr. G. W. Wightman, of the Seventeenth Lancers of the British Light Brigade, and a survivor of the wild charge at Balaclava, relates, in the ‘Electric Magazine’ for June, 1892, the incident of Captain Nolan’s death during that charge…
"We had ridden barely two hundred yards and were still at the ’trot,‘ when poor Nolan’s fate came to him…[suffering a fatal wound, his] hand dropped the sword, but the arm remained erect. Kinglake writes that ‘what had once been Nolan’ maintained the strong military seat until the ‘erect form dropped out of the saddle’…The sword-hand indeed remained upraised and rigid, but all other limbs so curled in on the contorted trunk as by a spasm, that we wondered how for the moment the huddled form kept the saddle.
"It is quite as remarkable that a man stricken unto death by the fragment of a shell should continue erect in the saddle, with sword-arm upraised and rigid, while the other limbs so curled in on the contorted trunk that those who saw him ’wondered how the huddled form kept the saddle,’ as that a man as his head is stricken off should momentarily rise on his hands.
"Mr. Wightman, in the same article, relates the still more remarkable case of Sergeant Talbot’s death:
"It was about this time that Sergeant Talbot had his head clean carried off by a round shot, yet for about thirty yards farther the headless body kept the saddle, the lance at the charge firmly gripped under the right arm.
“After this well attested fact, and many others of a similar nature that might be cited, it is not worth while being skeptical about Shiz convulsively rising on his hands for a moment after his head was stricken off.” (New Witnesses for God, 3:556-7)