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Jaredites

The first nation the record places on this land: a people led from “the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people” (Ether 1:33) across the sea in eight barges, raised up as “a great nation” (Ether 1:43), and then ground through a long succession of reigns of rebellion, captivity, and restoration until, driven by the same secret combinations and the same serve-God-or-be-swept-off decree that later governs the Nephites, they extinguish themselves in a war of “nearly two millions” (Ether 15:2) at the hill Ramah — the very hill the Nephites will call Cumorah. Their record is the twenty-four gold plates Limhi’s lost expedition recovered; Moroni abridges it as the book of Ether.

The Jaredite name-collision wall. The book of Ether carries the record’s heaviest load of names that look like Nephite names but are not. Every referent below is a Jaredite, routed to this page or to Cited and Minor Figures — never to the similarly-named Nephite page. There are also two Jareds (the righteous founder of chs. 1–6, and Jared son of Omer, the usurper of ch. 8, who commissioned his own father’s beheading in a plot that failed and was himself “murdered upon his throne” (9:6) — opposite in valence) and two Libs (the righteous king of 10:18, in whose day the serpents were destroyed, and the terminal usurper of 14:10, “a man of great stature”). None of these are cross-linked to any Nephite person page.

Jaredite referent (in Ether)Where it appearsNot to be confused with
Noah, a rebel kingson of Corihor, 7:14–21King Noah son of Zeniff; Noah of the ark (a simile, 6:7)
Aaron, a name in the royal line1:16; 10:31Aaron son of Mosiah; the Lamanite king Aaron
Nimrod, a valley2:1Nimrod son of Cohor (7:22) — a different Jaredite
Shiblom / Shiblon, a kingreign 11:4; genealogy 1:11Shiblon son of Alma
Morianton, a kinggenealogy 1:22; reign 10:9Morianton the Nephite dissenter (Alma 50)
Gilgal, a valley13:27the Nephite city / captain Gilgal
Coriantumr, the last kingreign 12:1; the final wars, 13:15–15:32; the survivor found by the people of Zarahemla (Omni 1:21)Coriantumr the Nephite dissenter-general who took Zarahemla (Helaman 1:15, 1:20)
Nehor, a land and cityland 7:4; city 7:9Nehor the priestcraft founder executed at hill Manti (Alma 1:15)

Moron is both a king and a land: the king appears in the genealogy at 1:7 and reigns at 11:14 (not 10:14, which is Levi’s verse); the land of Moron, “where the king dwelt,” is at 7:5–6. Of the dynastic names Shez, Levi, Corom, Kish, Seth, Com, Heth, Kib, Shule, five — Shez, Corom, Com, Kib, Shule — occur in no verse of the frozen corpus outside the book of Ether. Four do occur elsewhere: Levi in 71 verses, inside the record itself at 3 Nephi 24:3 (“he shall purify the sons of Levi”) and across the Old Testament; Kish in 17, including Saul’s line at 1 Chronicles 8:30; Seth in 15, as Adam’s son at Genesis 4:25 and Moses 6:2; Heth in 12, as Canaan’s son at Genesis 10:15. All nine belong to no Nephite figure. (Counted word-boundary over distinct verses in raw/ top-level, raw/ether-*.md excluded.)

Account

The tower, the departure, and the crossing (chs. 1–6)

The nation begins with a prayer against a curse. When “the Lord confounded the language of the people” at the great tower and swore “that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth” (Ether 1:33), Jared asked his brother to “cry unto the Lord, that he will not confound us” (Ether 1:34) — and the language of Jared, his brother, their families and their friends was spared (1:35–37). Promised “a land which is choice above all the lands of the earth” (Ether 1:42) and that of their seed the Lord would “raise up… a great nation” with “none greater… upon all the face of the earth” (Ether 1:43), they gathered flocks, seeds, and “swarms of bees” (2:3) and went down “into the valley which was northward, (and the name of the valley was Nimrod, being called after the mighty hunter)” (Ether 2:1).

The origin the Jaredites’ own record supplies here is the same one the Nephite record had already carried for centuries:

[Textual] — shared phrasing: the tower origin, from both ends of the record. The Jaredite nation’s first narrative verse and the Nephite summary of that nation share one clause word for word:

  • Ether 1:33: “Which Jared came forth with his brother and their families, with some others and their families, from the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people…”
  • Omni 1:22: “…his first parents came out from the tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people…”

The shared clause runs across three verses — Omni 1:22, Mosiah 28:17 (“the building of the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people”), and Ether 1:33 — the Nephite record describing this people twice before Ether’s own account gives it a first-person leg. The confounding of tongues is the text’s own internal datum; whether it corresponds to a real-world tower is an external question outside this wiki’s scope. Both ends of this pairing are Book of Mormon verses: the corpus’s own tower account — Genesis 11:1–9, where “the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9) — is not an endpoint here.

After building “barges” (2:16) lit by sixteen stones the Lord touched (the theophany and the light-problem belong to The Brother of Jared), the company “were driven forth, three hundred and forty and four days upon the water” (Ether 6:11) and “did land upon the shore of the promised land” (6:12).

The first kingship, against warning (ch. 6)

As the founders aged, “the people desired of them that they should anoint one of their sons to be a king over them” (Ether 6:22). The brother of Jared’s answer became the seed of the whole chronicle that follows: “Surely this thing leadeth into captivity” (Ether 6:23). Jared overruled him, the firstborn refused the crown, and at last “Orihah was anointed to be king over the people” (Ether 6:27). The kingship-warning as a doctrinal parallel — the corpus’s earliest anti-monarchy statement, later made law by Mosiah II — is weighed on Kings and Judges; its in-text fulfillment comes one reign on, when Corihor takes king Kib captive, “which brought to pass the saying of the brother of Jared that they would be brought into captivity” (Ether 7:5).

The dynastic cycle (chs. 7–11)

From Orihah the record becomes a compressed chronicle of reign after reign, cycling with almost liturgical regularity: a son rebels, takes the king captive, and either the captive line is restored by a righteous descendant or the usurper’s own house collapses. The pattern runs Orihah → Kib → Shule (7:3–10) → Omer → the usurper Jared and Akish → Omer restored (8:1; 9:13) → Emer → Coriantum → Com → Heth (9:14–27) → Shez → Riplakish → Morianton → Kim → Levi → Corom → Kish → Lib → Hearthom → Com (10:1–32) → Shiblom → Ahah → Ethem → Moron (11:4–14) — after whom Moron “dwelt in captivity all the remainder of his days” (11:18) and his son Coriantor “dwelt in captivity all his days” (11:19; the same clause closes the verse recording Coriantor’s death, 11:23). Coriantor’s son Ether is not among the captives: he “came forth in the days of Coriantumr, and began to prophesy” (12:2), and the last king over the land was Coriantumr (12:1). Each name is drawn from the genealogy of chapter 1 and the forward narrative of chapters 6–11; the full king-by-king roster, with its captivities and interregnums, is kept on Cited and Minor Figures.

Between the wars the record pauses on prosperity, most fully in two catalogs of goods. Under Emer the land grew “exceedingly rich” (9:16), with “all manner of fruit… of gold, and of silver” (9:17) and livestock including a line the record names but does not gloss: “there were elephants and cureloms and cumoms; all of which were useful unto man” (Ether 9:19). The catalog under Lib adds mining, metallurgy “of gold, and of silver, and of iron, and of copper” (10:23), cloth, tools, and “all manner of weapons of war” (10:27) — “never could be a people more blessed” (10:28).

Prosperity turns on the treatment of prophets. The cycle — prophets sent → mocked, cast out, or slain → curse, famine, or war → repentance (this page’s summary schema, not a quotation) — recurs under Heth (9:28–29), in the days of Com (11:1–3), under Shiblom — whose brother had the prophets put to death (11:4–7) — and in Coriantor’s day (11:20–22); Shule’s reign is the early counter-case, the cycle arrested by a royal protection law (7:23–27). The ⚖️ pattern callout for this Jaredite prophet-rejection cycle (a page callout, not a registered record) is hosted on Kings and Judges. Under Heth, whose people cast prophets “into pits and left them to perish” (9:29), came “a great dearth” (9:30) and “poisonous serpents” (9:31) that drove the flocks “towards the land southward, which was called by the Nephites Zarahemla” (Ether 9:31) and then hedged up the way (Heth himself “had perished by the famine,” 10:1); the serpent barrier stood until, generations later, “in the days of Lib the poisonous serpents were destroyed” (10:19). Later still, a “great destruction, such an one as never had been known” fell in the days of Shiblom, with “many famines and pestilences” (11:7).

The secret combinations (ch. 8 onward)

The engine that drives most of these collapses is the secret oath, and the book of Ether traces it to its source. When Jared son of Omer lost the kingdom, his daughter revived an old evil out of the record itself — “is there not an account concerning them of old, that they by their secret plans did obtain kingdoms and great glory?” (8:9) — and had Akish administer “the oaths which were given by them of old… handed down even from Cain, who was a murderer from the beginning” (8:15). Moroni’s declaration that these combinations “have caused the destruction of this people… and also the destruction of the people of Nephi” (8:21), and the tracing of the oath to Cain and the devil, are the capstone of the whole secret-combinations arc and are hosted on Secret Combinations — not duplicated here. What belongs to the nation’s story is the outcome: the combination “corrupted the hearts of all the people” (9:6) and recurs through the later collapses down to the final war — though not at all of them. Five later collapses name no combination: Riplakish killed in a tax rebellion (10:8), Morianton’s conquest with “an army of outcasts” (10:9), Kim brought into captivity by his brother (10:14), the kingdom “taken away” from Hearthom (10:30), and the mighty man who overthrows Moron (11:17–18).

The murder that founds the ch. 8 combination also anchors the two-Jareds distinction. Jared son of Omer commissioned his own father’s beheading — “if ye will bring unto me the head of my father, the king” (Ether 8:12) — but the plot failed: “the Lord warned Omer in a dream that he should depart out of the land” (Ether 9:3), and Omer fled and was later restored. It was Jared himself who was then beheaded, by the men Akish “had sworn by the oath of the ancients,” who “obtained the head of his father-in-law, as he sat upon his throne” (Ether 9:5). Omer was never killed — a point the record is exact about.

The final war and the extinction (chs. 13–15)

In the days of the last king, Coriantumr, “there began to be a great war among the people” (Ether 13:15) as rival “mighty men” sought the kingdom by “secret plans”. The war ran through a succession of challengers — Shared, his brother Gilead, then Lib “a man of great stature” (14:10; note this is not the earlier righteous king Lib), and finally Lib’s brother Shiz, of whom “a cry went forth… Who can stand before the army of Shiz? Behold, he sweepeth the earth before him!” (14:18). It ended in total mutual extinction. Coriantumr “saw that there had been slain by the sword already nearly two millions of his people” (Ether 15:2); the survivors gathered every remaining soul and killed each other over days until two men were left (the text gives no figure between the “two millions” and the closing double-digit counts, 15:23–25). The serve-God-or-be-swept-off decree the Lord had sworn to the brother of Jared (2:8; 2:9) was executed to the letter.

The physical aftermath is the same one the Nephite record reports from a distance:

[Textual] — paraphrase: the unburied dead, near and far. Ether describes the extinction’s aftermath at close range; the Nephite record summarizes the same aftermath centuries later:

  • Ether 14:22: “…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.”
  • Omni 1:22: “…their bones lay scattered in the land northward.”

The prophesied intervening state is Ether 11:6 — “their bones should become as heaps of earth upon the face of the land” — which pairs with Mosiah 8:8’s bone-covered land (what Limhi’s lost expedition stumbled upon) on Places and Geography; that leg is x-referenced, not registered here.

The last two combatants were Coriantumr and Shiz. When at length “Coriantumr had leaned upon his sword, that he rested a little… he smote off the head of Shiz” (Ether 15:30), and then “fell to the earth, and became as if he had no life” (15:32). Two Jaredites are left alive at the book’s end. The prophet Ether stood outside the armies from the start — the gathering took in “all the people upon all the face of the land, who had not been slain, save it was Ether” (Ether 15:12) — and he is set apart to finish and hide the record (15:33). Coriantumr is the other: falling “as if he had no life” (15:32) is not death, and the prophecy had been exact — “every soul should be destroyed save it were Coriantumr” (Ether 13:21) — so he lives to be “discovered by the people of Zarahemla” (Omni 1:21), as the next section reports. Ether’s own fate, and his last words, belong to Ether.

What the Nephite record already knew

Long before Moroni abridged Ether, the Nephite record had brushed against this vanished nation in at least seven distinct places — counted by reading every Book of Mormon chapter file in raw/ for a contact with the destroyed people. Of those seven, one, Omni 1:22, is the standing far end of both textual pairings this page registers. Limhi’s expedition, seeking Zarahemla, found instead “a land which was covered with bones of men, and of beasts” (Mosiah 8:8) and brought back “twenty-four plates which are filled with engravings… of pure gold” (Mosiah 8:9), with Limhi “desirous to know the cause of their destruction” (8:12). Mosiah II translated those plates by the interpreters, and the account “did cause the people of Mosiah to mourn exceedingly” (Mosiah 28:18). Earlier still, “a large stone… with engravings on it” (Omni 1:20) had told of “one Coriantumr” who “was discovered by the people of Zarahemla; and he dwelt with them for the space of nine moons” (Omni 1:21) — the sole king, surfacing among the living, exactly as Ether had prophesied. That survivor-prophecy and its Omni fulfillment are hosted on Ether. And the land itself carried the memory: the Nephites named it Desolation, “which had been peopled and been destroyed, of whose bones we have spoken” (Alma 22:30). Three further contacts complete the seven: the same lost expedition narrated a second time, which found “a land which had been peopled and which had been destroyed” (Mosiah 21:25–28); Alma’s charge to Helaman concerning the twenty-four plates and “the secret works of those people who have been destroyed” (Alma 37:21–31); and Helaman’s tracing of the works of darkness to “the people who came from that tower into this land” (Helaman 6:28).

The type, named

At the record’s very end the mirror stops being implied and is named. Writing his last epistle as his own people go down, Mormon fixes the Jaredites as the pattern the Nephites are dying by:

[Textual] — paraphrase: the Nephite fate named to the Jaredite type. Mormon states the comparison outright:

  • Moroni 9:23: “…if they perish it will be like unto the Jaredites, because of the wilfulness of their hearts, seeking for blood and revenge.”
  • Ether 15:2: “He saw that there had been slain by the sword already nearly two millions of his people, and he began to sorrow in his heart…”

“Like unto the Jaredites” occurs at only this one verse in the whole record — the sole place a Nephite fate is named to the earlier nation. There is no shared phrase between the two verses; the textual tie is the explicit naming (an allusion), which is why the record is typed paraphrase, not shared phrasing. The reason Mormon gives — “the wilfulness of their hearts, seeking for blood and revenge” — names the same failure the book of Ether has just diagnosed at the Jaredite end: hearts given up past recovery (“given up unto the hardness of their hearts… that they might be destroyed”, Ether 15:19). This clause is the in-text witness beneath the interpretive extinction-type reading below: the comparison is now the text’s own — Mormon says it — even as the fuller claim, that the record structures the one extinction as the pattern of the other, remains a reading to weigh. The Jaredites were the first nation on this promised land and the first swept off it; Mormon’s clause sets the Nephites, at their end, as the second — by name.

Significance

The Jaredites are the record’s one complete civilization outside the Lehite story — a whole nation given from origin to extinction — and the record names the comparison between the two nations once, outright: if the Nephites perish “it will be like unto the Jaredites” (Moroni 9:23). That the account is structured as a deliberate mirror is a reading, weighed in the callout below and not asserted here. The nation runs on the same two forces the Nephite books diagnose: the secret combination “handed down… from Cain” (8:15), and the land-covenant that “whatsoever nation shall possess it shall serve God, or they shall be swept off” (Ether 2:9). Its kingship is founded over an explicit warning that monarchy “leadeth into captivity” (6:23), and the chronicle that follows is that warning’s longest demonstration. Its prophets are sent, rejected, and vindicated in the same cycle the Nephite prophets walk. And it ends where the Nephite nation will end — swept off its choice land, its bones left for the worms, its record buried to be found by strangers.

⚖️ Interpretation — weigh this. The Jaredite extinction can be read as the type of which the prophesied Nephite extinction is the antitype — two nations swept off one land under one decree, the second warned by the recovered record of the first. The textual pieces are firm: Coriantumr “saw that there had been slain… nearly two millions of his people” (Ether 15:2); Alma prophesies “even until the people of Nephi shall become extinct” (Alma 45:11); the Jaredite plates were translated precisely so “that all people should know” their destruction (Mosiah 28:19; the account “did cause the people of Mosiah to mourn exceedingly,” 28:18); and the two extinctions are sealed to a single hill — Ramah for the Jaredites, “that same hill where my father Mormon did hide up the records” (Ether 15:11), which Mormon calls Cumorah (the Ramah = Cumorah identity is registered on Places and Geography). What is offered for weighing, not asserted, is that the record structures the one extinction as the pattern of the other. That the two nations are one comparison is itself no longer only editorial — Mormon names it outright (“like unto the Jaredites,” Moroni 9:23; see The type, named above); what stays interpretive here is only the structuring. The Nephite antitype’s own registered home, (Mormon 8:7 ↔ Alma 45:11), is itself an interpretive-tier record; it stands here as an interpretive companion, not as settled textual ground.

Key references

Ether · The Brother of Jared · Secret Combinations · Kings and Judges · Places and Geography · Promised Land · Record Transmission and the Plates · The Coming Forth of Scripture · Mosiah I · Limhi · Mormon · Cited and Minor Figures · Index · Connections

Sources

The Book of Mormon (Ether 1–15; Omni 1:20–22, Mosiah 8:8–12, 21:25–28 and 28:17–19, Alma 22:30 and 37:21–31, and Helaman 6:28 for what the Nephite record knew of the Jaredites; Alma 45:11 in the extinction-type callout; Mormon 6:6 as the far end of the Ramah = Cumorah identity, which is registered on Places and Geography and only named in the closing paragraph here; Moroni 9:23 for Mormon’s naming of the Nephite fate as “like unto the Jaredites”; 3 Nephi 24:3, Alma 1:15, Helaman 1:15 and Mormon 6:14 for the name-occurrence and name-collision checks). Outside the Book of Mormon, those same checks cite Genesis 4:25, 10:15 and 11:1–9, 1 Chronicles 8:30, and Moses 6:2.

Every quote on this page is taken verbatim from the source text (Ether 1–15 for the Jaredite narrative; Omni 1, Mosiah 8, 21 and 28, Alma 22, 37 and 45, and Helaman 6 for the far ends; Moroni 9:23 for Mormon’s naming of the Nephite fate as “like unto the Jaredites”; 3 Nephi 24, Genesis 4, 10 and 11, 1 Chronicles 8, and Moses 6 for the name-occurrence checks), each cited to its verse and checked character-for-character against the frozen source. This page registers four connection records — the tower-origin and unburied-dead pairings and Mormon’s naming of the Nephite fate to the Jaredite type ([textual]) and the extinction-type parallel ([interpretive]); the secret-combinations arc (Ether 8), the Ramah = Cumorah identity (Ether 15:11 ↔ Mormon 6:6), the kingship-warning and prophet-rejection patterns, and the bones-as-heaps-of-earth leg (Ether 11:6 ↔ Mosiah 8:8) are hosted on their home pages (Secret Combinations, Places and Geography, Kings and Judges) and cross-linked, not re-registered. The one ⚖️ callout is offered for weighing, not asserted. The name-collision table guards the book’s heaviest disambiguation load, though not the whole of it. Five of its names have a Book of Mormon namesake outside Ether — Noah, Aaron, Shiblom, Morianton, Gilgal — and the Jaredite referent is distinct from each; the other four (Nimrod, Moron, Lib, Jared) have none, and the table disambiguates those internally instead — valley against person, king against land, the two Libs, the two Jareds (the one Jared outside Ether, Moroni 1:1, is this same Jaredite). Two Jaredite/Nephite collisions the table does not carry: Coriantumr, the last Jaredite king (Ether 12:1), against the Nephite dissenter of Helaman 1:15; and Nehor, a Jaredite land and city (Ether 7:4, 7:9), against Nehor of Alma 1:15. The Shiblom row also omits the Nephite Shiblom of Mormon 6:14. (Counted word-boundary across all 239 Book of Mormon chapter files in raw/.) External, real-world historicity — the tower, the location of Ramah, the identity of the cureloms — is out of scope.