A whole civilization armed its men, its women, and its children, and fought until every last person was dead but one — because two men would not stop. Coriantumr and Shiz are the Book of Mormon's parable of pride carried all the way to its end, set deliberately at the close of the record as a warning the reader is not meant to survive unshaken.
The War That Would Not End
By the time we reach Coriantumr, the Jaredite nation is already far gone — generations of dynastic murder, secret combinations, kings dethroning kings, the long rot the brother of Jared foresaw the day his people first asked for a crown. Coriantumr was a mighty king and a skilled warrior, and his reign was one endless war against a succession of rivals who rose to pull him down. He was warned. The prophet Ether came to him with a promise and a threat from the Lord, laid out with terrible clarity:
If he would repent, and all his household, the Lord would give unto him his kingdom and spare the people. Otherwise they should be destroyed, and all his household save it were himself. And he should only live to see the fulfilling of the prophecies … and Coriantumr should receive a burial by them; and every soul should be destroyed save it were Coriantumr. (Ether 13:20–21)
The offer was mercy itself: repent, and your people live. The cost of refusing was total: everyone dies, and you alone survive to see it. Coriantumr did not repent. And so the prophecy began to grind toward its fulfillment, and the most chilling thing about the chapters that follow is that nobody could stop it even as everybody could see where it led.
The Drunkenness of Vengeance
The final antagonist was Shiz, who rose to avenge his brother Lib, whom Coriantumr had killed. And here the war stops being a war over a kingdom and becomes something older and darker — a blood feud that has consumed its own original cause and now runs on pure hatred. The record describes the spread of it in language that sounds like a description of madness:
And so great and lasting had been the war, and so long had been the scene of bloodshed and carnage, that the whole face of the land was covered with the bodies of the dead. And so swift and speedy was the war that there was none left to bury the dead, but they did march forth from the shedding of blood to the shedding of blood, leaving the bodies of both men, women, and children strewed upon the face of the land, to become a prey to the worms of the flesh. (Ether 14:21–22)
No one even stopped to bury the dead. They stepped over the corpses of their own families to go on killing. And then the line that names the real horror of it:
And the Spirit of the Lord had ceased striving with them, and Satan had full power over the hearts of the people; for they were given up unto the hardness of their hearts, and the blindness of their minds that they might be destroyed; wherefore they went again to battle. (Ether 15:19)
The Spirit of the Lord had ceased striving with them. This is the spiritual diagnosis of the whole catastrophe. It was not, finally, that they could not stop. It was that they had hardened themselves past the point where they would — past the reach of the very Spirit that might have softened one heart enough to lay down one sword. They had fed their hatred so long that there was nothing left in them for grace to work on. And so a whole people, men and women and children together, armored themselves and marched out, day after day, to a war whose only possible end was that no one would be left.
The Count Down to Two
The last chapter of Ether is one of the most harrowing things in scripture precisely because of its arithmetic. The armies dwindle, and the record counts them down like a man counting the dying. They fight all day; and when the night came they were drunken with anger, even as a man who is drunken with wine (Ether 15:22) — and slept on their swords, and rose to fight again. The numbers fall: the hosts shrink to a few thousand, then to fifty-two against sixty-nine, then to twenty-seven against thirty-two (Ether 15:25). And still neither leader would yield.
Even at the very end, with almost no one left, the offer of mercy was still on the table and was refused. There is a moment when Coriantumr, looking at the nearly two millions of his people whom he had caused to be slain, finally began to repent (Ether 15:1–3) — and wrote to Shiz offering to give up the kingdom to stop the bloodshed. Shiz agreed, on one condition: that Coriantumr give himself up to be killed. And the remnant on both sides, hearing it, were too angry to accept any peace at all (Ether 15:4–6). They had a chance to stop with a few thousand still alive, and the hatred would not let them take it. So they fought on, down and down, until there were only the two armies' last handfuls, and then only the two men.
The Last Two Men
The end is an image no one who reads it forgets:
And it came to pass that when they had all fallen by the sword, save it were Coriantumr and Shiz, behold Shiz had fainted with the loss of blood. And it came to pass that when Coriantumr had leaned upon his sword, that he rested a little, he smote off the head of Shiz. And it came to pass that after he had smitten off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised up on his hands and fell; and after that he had struggled for breath, he died. (Ether 15:29–31)
Two men, alone in a field of millions of corpses, so spent they can barely stand. Coriantumr leans on his sword to rest before he can even lift it. He beheads Shiz — and the headless body raises itself up on its hands, gasps for breath, and falls. It is the most grotesque image in the Book of Mormon, and it is grotesque on purpose. The death-spasm of Shiz — a decapitated body still reflexively struggling to live, to rise, to fight — is the perfect, horrible emblem of the whole civilization: a thing that should already be dead, still twitching with the reflex of hatred, unable to stop even when there is nothing left of it to continue. The nation's last gesture, embodied in its last man, is a headless reach toward one more breath of war.
And Coriantumr stood alone — the king who had been offered his people's lives in exchange for his repentance and had said no, now the sole survivor of a world he had emptied, fulfilling Ether's prophecy to the letter. He would wander out and be found, much later, by the people of Zarahemla, and live among strangers for the space of nine moons before he too died (Omni 1:21) — the last Jaredite, buried by another people exactly as the prophet had foretold. He lived to see that every word was true, and the seeing was his whole reward.
The Parable at the End of the Book
The placement of this story is not an accident, and Moroni — who abridged it and set it where it sits — surely knew what he was doing. The Jaredites are the first civilization of the promised land and the Nephites are the second, and Moroni, writing as the last Nephite while his own people slide toward an identical extinction, inserts the Jaredite ending as a mirror held up to his own dying nation and to every reader who comes after. This is where it goes, the book is saying. This is what pride and vengeance and a hardened heart finally come to, if nothing turns them: a field of millions, and two men too drunk with anger to stop, and a headless body reaching for one more breath.
And the Book of Mormon offers, within its own pages, the exact counter-image, which is why this portrait points across the whole record to another. Earlier, the Anti-Nephi-Lehies — former murderers — buried their weapons in the earth and knelt down to be slaughtered rather than ever shed blood again, and their refusal to kill converted more souls than fighting ever could. Coriantumr and Shiz are the precise opposite answer to the same sword: a people who would rather annihilate themselves utterly than yield an inch. Two responses to violence, set at the two ends of the book — the buried sword and the unsheathed one. One people chose to die rather than kill, and their faith outlived the grave in the next generation. The other chose to kill until there was no one left to die, and their hatred outlived the head of the man who carried it by a few seconds and not one breath more. The book lays both before us and lets the contrast do the preaching.
A whole nation armed its women and its children and stepped over its own unburied dead to keep killing, because the Spirit had stopped striving and two proud men would not stop. Offered their people's lives in exchange for repentance, they refused; offered peace with thousands still alive, they were too drunk with anger to take it. It ended with two men alone in a field of millions, one too weak to lift his sword, and a beheaded body raising itself on its hands to gasp one last breath of war. It is the book's parable of pride carried to the end of the line — set deliberately against the people who buried their swords and chose to die rather than wield them. Two answers to the sword, at the two ends of the record. We are meant to feel, in our bones, which one leads home.