Cureloms and cumoms

Cureloms and cumoms are rare animals recorded in the Jaredite account as useful to human beings, with particular emphasis placed on their value alongside elephants. Although the text gives no physical description, behavior, or later history for them, their inclusion among domesticated and economically useful animals makes them an important detail in the Book of Ether’s portrait of Jaredite life: the civilization’s material world contains creatures that are both recognizable and wholly unfamiliar to the reader.

Appearance in the Jaredite Record

Cureloms and cumoms appear in a catalog of animals associated with the prosperity of the Jaredite people. The record first lists cattle, oxen, cows, sheep, swine, goats, and other animals useful for human food. It then adds horses and asses, followed by elephants and Cureloms and cumoms. The sequence moves from familiar livestock to increasingly extraordinary creatures, giving the passage the cumulative force of an inventory of abundance rather than an isolated report about a single animal.

The wording distinguishes Cureloms and cumoms from the ordinary food animals. The earlier animals are described chiefly in relation to nourishment, whereas the closing statement says that all the listed creatures were useful to human beings, especially elephants and Cureloms and cumoms. Their importance therefore appears to exceed mere existence: the narrative presents them as particularly valuable members of the Jaredite animal world.

Use and Uncertain Nature

The record identifies Cureloms and cumoms by function but leaves their nature unresolved. Unlike cattle or sheep, they are not assigned a clear modern equivalent, and the passage does not state whether they were used for food, labor, transport, clothing, or another purpose. That silence prevents a confident reconstruction of their appearance or role. What the text does establish is that they were animals known within the Jaredite setting and considered useful by its inhabitants.

This combination of specificity and obscurity gives the names unusual narrative weight. The animals are not presented as symbolic creatures or as supernatural beings; they belong to the practical world of herds, livestock, and resources. Yet their unfamiliar names preserve a trace of a world that the record transmits without fully translating its material culture into later categories. Cureloms and cumoms consequently function as evidence of cultural and ecological distance as much as zoological description.

Place in the Book of Ether

The reference occurs in the Jaredite record, which the Book of Mormon presents as an abridgment of an older history of a people scattered when the Lord confounded the language of those building a tower to get to heaven. Within that broader account, the animals help establish the distinctiveness of the Jaredite civilization. The record does not describe only rulers, migrations, conflicts, and divine judgments; it also preserves the creatures that supported human life and prosperity.

The passage’s placement within a list of useful animals connects Cureloms and cumoms to the Jaredite relationship with land and resources. Human flourishing is shown through access to animals that provide food or other practical benefits, while the special mention of these creatures and elephants suggests an environment richer than the familiar livestock economy alone. Their presence thus enlarges the scale of the society being remembered, even though the narrative gives no separate episode involving them.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Cureloms and cumoms occupy only a few lines, but their effect is disproportionate to their narrative length. They interrupt the familiarity of the animal catalog with names that cannot be easily domesticated by modern expectation. In doing so, they remind readers that the Jaredite record preserves a past whose geography, languages, and living species are not completely recoverable. The creatures are concrete, useful, and culturally embedded, yet they remain partly beyond the reader’s visual grasp.

Their mention also contributes to the Book of Ether’s recurring movement between preservation and loss. The Jaredite record survives as an abridgment of a vanished people, and the names of Cureloms and cumoms survive with only minimal explanation. The animals therefore become small but vivid remnants of a destroyed world: not allegorical monsters, but ordinary resources within a civilization whose broader history has been compressed and whose material knowledge is incomplete. Their enduring significance lies precisely in this tension between remembered usefulness and unanswered identity.