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Ether the Prophet

Naming — Ether the prophet, not Moroni the abridger. This page is Ether, the last Jaredite prophet and the man whose record — the twenty-four plates — Moroni abridged as the book that bears his name (“which is called the Book of Ether”, Ether 1:2). The two voices braid throughout: Ether’s own preaching reaches the reader only through Moroni’s abridgment, and Moroni repeatedly breaks in under his own name (“I, Moroni,” 12:6; 13:1). Where the editorial frame says “I” — “I was about to write more, but I am forbidden” (13:13) — the speaker is Moroni, not Ether; those sentences belong to Moroni’s hand and are not attributed to the prophet here.

Coriantumr — one of three in the record. The Coriantumr of this page is Ether’s last king (12:1) and, in the prophecy’s own terms, the sole survivor of the final battle — “every soul should be destroyed save it were Coriantumr” (13:21; chs. 13–15) — with the prophet himself the standing exception, alive to watch the destruction and finish the record (15:12, 15:33). He is the same Coriantumr later found by the people of Zarahemla in Omni 1:21. He is not the Coriantumr of Helaman 1:15 — a Nephite dissenter, “a descendant of Zarahemla”, who led a Lamanite army against his own people centuries later — a separate man kept among the Cited and Minor Figures. Nor should Ether’s father Coriantor (1:6–7; 11:23) be merged with the earlier Jaredite king Coriantum (9:21–25), a near-homonym and a different man.

The namesake of the book of Ether and the last Jaredite prophet — the man whose name the book carries, though the abridgment that preserves his words is Moroni’s. Born to Coriantor, who “dwelt in captivity all his days”, Ether came forth in the reign of the final king Coriantumr as “a prophet of the Lord” who “could not be restrained”, crying repentance “from the morning, even until the going down of the sun”. Rejected and cast out, he watched his nation destroy itself from the cavity of a rock, wrote its end by night, carried the Lord’s ultimatum to Coriantumr, saw “that the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled”, finished and hid the record — and closed with a last word that leaves his own fate, translation or death, an open question the text does not resolve.

Account

A prophet born to a captive line

Ether stands at the end of the Jaredite genealogy the book of Ether opens with. Moroni names him as the author of the source record — “He that wrote this record was Ether, and he was a descendant of Coriantor” (Ether 1:6) — and then traces the line backward through some thirty generations to its origin: “Coriantor was the son of Moron” (1:7), on down to “Kib was the son of Orihah, who was the son of Jared” (1:32), the Jared who “came forth with his brother… from the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people” (1:33). Ether is thus of the founding stock, the last named descendant of the man the nation began with.

His immediate forebears held nothing but a broken throne. His grandfather Moron was overthrown by “a descendant of the brother of Jared” (11:17) and “dwelt in captivity all the remainder of his days; and he begat Coriantor” (11:18); his father “Coriantor dwelt in captivity all his days” (11:19); and the genealogy closes on Ether’s own birth into that captivity: “Coriantor begat Ether, and he died, having dwelt in captivity all his days” (11:23). The prophet is born, that is, to a deposed royal line at the far end of the dynastic collapse — the heir of kings who reigned no longer.

”A prophet of the Lord”: the morning-to-sundown cry

Ether’s ministry falls in the reign of the last king: “the days of Ether were in the days of Coriantumr; and Coriantumr was king over all the land” (12:1). The record gives his call in a single line — “Ether was a prophet of the Lord; wherefore Ether came forth in the days of Coriantumr, and began to prophesy unto the people, for he could not be restrained because of the Spirit of the Lord which was in him” (12:2).

His preaching was relentless and public: “he did cry from the morning, even until the going down of the sun, exhorting the people to believe in God unto repentance lest they should be destroyed, saying unto them that by faith all things are fulfilled” (12:3). The message he cried was one of hope grounded in faith — that “whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world,” a hope “which… maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works” (12:4). And it was refused for the reason the record repeats over the whole Jaredite decline: “Ether did prophesy great and marvelous things unto the people, which they did not believe, because they saw them not” (12:5).

At this point the abridger steps forward. “And now, I, Moroni, would speak somewhat concerning these things” (12:6) opens the long meditation on faith, hope, and charity that fills the rest of chapter 12 — the faith-definition, the litany of faith-heroes, the weakness-and-grace exchange, the farewell to the Gentiles. That discourse is Moroni’s own, prompted by Ether’s cry but written in Moroni’s voice; its connections are treated on Alma the Younger (the faith-definition against Alma 32), The Atonement / Plan of Redemption, and The Brother of Jared, and are cross-linked here, not registered on this page. What belongs to Ether is the cry itself (12:2–5): the man who could not be restrained, preaching from sunrise to sundown to a people who would not believe what they could not see.

Cast out: the prophet in the cavity of a rock

Ether’s testimony ranged from creation to the last things. Moroni reports that the people “rejected all the words of Ether; for he truly told them of all things, from the beginning of man” (13:2) — including that the land was “a choice land above all other lands” and “the place of the New Jerusalem, which should come down out of heaven” (13:2–3), and that “Ether saw the days of Christ, and he spake concerning a New Jerusalem upon this land” (13:4). That New-Jerusalem prophecy — the record’s fullest, distinguishing the New Jerusalem built “upon this land” (13:6) from the Jerusalem “of old” rebuilt (13:5, 13:11) — is treated in full on The New Jerusalem and is only summarized here. (Scope disclosure: the superlative is scoped to the Book of Mormon. Wider in the corpus, Revelation gives the longer treatment — “I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven” (Revelation 21:2), then the city’s wall, gates, foundations, measurements and light across 21:9–27 and 22:1–5.)

The rejection turned to expulsion. After an editorial aside in his own voice — “And I was about to write more, but I am forbidden” — Moroni records Ether’s fate: “great and marvelous were the prophecies of Ether; but they esteemed him as naught, and cast him out; and he hid himself in the cavity of a rock by day, and by night he went forth viewing the things which should come upon the people” (13:13). From that hiding place he kept writing: “as he dwelt in the cavity of a rock he made the remainder of this record, viewing the destructions which came upon the people, by night” (13:14). The rock is his study as well as his refuge; the account of the final war is written by a man watching it from concealment. He returns to it again when the survivors hunt him — “they sought to kill Ether, but he fled from before them and hid again in the cavity of the rock” (13:22).

The ultimatum to Coriantumr

Once during the war the word of the Lord sent Ether out of hiding to the king himself. “In the second year the word of the Lord came to Ether, that he should go and prophesy unto Coriantumr that, if he would repent, and all his household, the Lord would give unto him his kingdom and spare the people” (13:20). The alternative was total: destruction for everyone but Coriantumr, who would survive alone to see the land pass to another people and be buried among them.

That prophecy finds an unusually exact fulfillment, which lands not in Ether at all but generations later in the small book of Omni:

[Textual] — the ultimatum and its fulfillment. Ether’s word to Coriantumr (Ether 13:21) sets the terms; Amaleki’s record (Omni 1:21) reports them met.

  • Ether 13:21: “…he should only live to see the fulfilling of the prophecies which had been spoken concerning another people receiving the land for their inheritance; and Coriantumr should receive a burial by them; and every soul should be destroyed save it were Coriantumr.”
  • Omni 1:21: “And they gave an account of one Coriantumr, and the slain of his people. And Coriantumr was discovered by the people of Zarahemla; and he dwelt with them for the space of nine moons.” The sole survivor surfaces among “another people” — the people of Zarahemla — exactly as foretold; the text shows the discovery and the nine-month sojourn, and leaves the burial itself implied rather than narrated. The full connection record is hosted on this page.

Coriantumr refused: “Coriantumr repented not, neither his household, neither the people; and the wars ceased not” (13:22). The prophecy carried its own guarantee that its subject would live to see the end — Moroni notes in passing “the word of the Lord which came to Ether that Coriantumr should not fall by the sword” (14:24) — and the whole of chapters 14–15 is the working-out of what Ether had said would happen. (This Coriantumr is the Jaredite king; the Nephite dissenter of the same name at Helaman 1:15 is a different man — see the naming note above.)

The sole watcher, and “the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled”

As the two armies gathered every last soul for the final battles, one man stood outside the count. When “they did gather together all the people upon all the face of the land, who had not been slain,” it was “save it was Ether” (15:12); and “Ether did behold all the doings of the people” (15:13) as the nation ground itself down to Coriantumr and Shiz alone. Only when it was over did the Lord call him out: “And the Lord spake unto Ether, and said unto him: Go forth. And he went forth, and beheld that the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled; and he finished his record; (and the hundredth part I have not written) and he hid them in a manner that the people of Limhi did find them” (15:33).

Three things happen in that one verse: Ether verifies the fulfillment he had prophesied, completes the record, and hides it so that it will be recovered in a later age. The recovery loop — the plates Ether hides here are the twenty-four plates Limhi’s expedition finds and Mosiah translates — is the transmission chain treated on The Coming Forth of Scripture and Record Transmission and the Plates, cross-linked here, not re-registered.

The last words: translated, or not

The book of Ether’s final sentence is Ether’s own — the record itself closes later, at Moroni 10:34 — and it leaves his end deliberately open: “Now the last words which are written by Ether are these: Whether the Lord will that I be translated, or that I suffer the will of the Lord in the flesh, it mattereth not, if it so be that I am saved in the kingdom of God. Amen” (15:34). The text poses the alternative — translation without death, or death “in the flesh” — and refuses to settle it, and so does the wiki: what became of Ether is a question the record itself declines to answer, resting the whole matter on salvation rather than on which fate came.

Significance

Ether is the last Jaredite prophet and, in a sense the book makes explicit, the book of Ether’s final cause: the twenty-four plates exist because he made and hid them (15:33), and the abridgment the reader holds is named for him. (He is not the record’s last prophet: Samuel prophesies to the Nephites long after the Jaredite end — “Samuel the prophet”, 3 Nephi 1:9, Mormon 2:10 — and Moroni closes the record at Moroni 10:34.) Yet his portrait is drawn almost entirely in the register of witness. He preaches to a people who will not believe “because they saw them not” (12:5); he is cast out and reduced to a watcher in a rock, keeping the record “by night” (13:14); he is the one soul the final muster leaves uncounted (15:12); and he ends by verifying that “the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled” (15:33). The prophet’s role, in the book’s last chapters, is to see and to certify — to survive the destruction precisely so that someone can write it down and testify that it happened as the word said.

His one registered connection turns on that certifying office. The ultimatum he carried to Coriantumr (13:21) fixes its own fulfillment inside the king’s remaining life — he should “only live to see the fulfilling of the prophecies” concerning another people receiving the land — and Coriantumr is duly found alive by the people of Zarahemla, dwelling with them “for the space of nine moons” (Omni 1:21). What the generations separate is not the prophecy from its fulfillment but the fulfillment from its report: the event is recorded nowhere in Ether’s own book and surfaces only in Amaleki’s, joined to Ether’s word across the seam between two records. Ether stands, finally, distinct from Moroni, the abridger whose editorial voice carries his words: where Moroni writes as the last survivor of the Nephite end, Ether is the last survivor-prophet of the Jaredite one, and the two national extinctions the record sets side by side each leave a single hand to close the account.

Key references

Moroni · The Jaredites · The New Jerusalem · The Brother of Jared · The Coming Forth of Scripture · Record Transmission and the Plates · Secret Combinations · Kings and Judges · Alma the Younger · The Atonement / Plan of Redemption · Places and Geography · Cited and Minor Figures · Index · Connections

Sources

The Book of Mormon (Ether 1; 9; 11–15 for Ether’s lineage, ministry, and end; Omni 1 for the fulfillment of the Coriantumr prophecy; Helaman 1:15 cited for the naming cross-reference; 3 Nephi 1:9, Mormon 2:10, and Moroni 10:34 cited for the record-scope disclosures). The New Testament (Revelation 21:2, 21:9–27; 22:1–5) is cited once, in the New-Jerusalem scope disclosure. The book of Ether is Moroni’s abridgment of the twenty-four plates; Moroni’s first-person editorial sentences within it (e.g. 12:6; 13:1, 13; 14:25) are his voice, not Ether’s, and are attributed accordingly.

Every quote on this page is taken verbatim from the source text (Ether 1, 9, 11–15; Omni 1; Helaman 1:15 in the naming note; Revelation 21:2 and “Samuel the prophet” of 3 Nephi 1:9 / Mormon 2:10 in the scope disclosures), each cited to its verse and checked against the frozen source. This page hosts one connection record: the ultimatum to Coriantumr (Ether 13:21) fulfilled in Amaleki’s account of the surviving king (Omni 1:21) — a [Textual] paraphrase-tier record. The in-book fulfillment notice (15:33) and the countdown of the last battles (15:23–32) are prose support for that record, not separate connections. The New Jerusalem prophecy (13:2–12) is hosted on The New Jerusalem; the record-transmission loop (15:33) on The Coming Forth of Scripture and Record Transmission and the Plates; Moroni’s faith discourse (12:6–41) on Alma the Younger, The Atonement / Plan of Redemption, and The Brother of Jared — all cross-linked, not duplicated here. The naming note guards two collisions: Ether the prophet against Moroni the abridger whose frame carries his words, and the Jaredite king Coriantumr against the Nephite dissenter Coriantumr of Helaman 1:15, with Ether’s father Coriantor kept distinct from the earlier king Coriantum. Whether Ether was translated or died in the flesh is left open by the text (15:34) and is not resolved here. External, real-world historicity is out of scope.