Ancient History and the Brother of Jared

In getting ready to teach the Sunday School lesson about the Brother of Jared and the first half of the book of Ether, I got lost on Wikipedia reading about all the historical stuff going on in and around Mesopotamia around the same time as the Jaredites leaving.

It kinda blew my mind and I was up way too late reading Wikipedia, and all of the related articles and sources it cites, into the night absorbing as much as I could.

Here's what I found:

We suspect the Jaredites lived in Babel near the Persian Gulf sometime around 2200-2300 BC. Around 3000-2500, Egyptians had started building pyramids as tombs using quarried stone. This practice seemed to spread into Mesopotamia, because by 2500-2000 BC, the Mesopotamians were building "Pyramids"  all along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers out of baked bricks and using bitumen or pitch (basically prehistoric, semi-fossilized slime) as mortar. These pyramids, or Ziggurats, were not as strong and prone to collapse, had a little different shape, and ended up being used as temples to Mesopotamian gods. None have survived in their original size, we can only guess and presume how big they were from a few eye-witness accounts of ancient historians.

One of the earliest Kings in Mesopotamia was apparently a guy named Nimrod, a mighty hunter (in 1932, Bugs Bunny called the dimwitted Elmer Fudd a "regular Nimrod" and the association seems to have stuck in America as a name to call someone we think is stupid) He ruled one of the first empires in the area, though most of what we know about him comes from traditions, religious documents, and stories. We don't have much factual evidence about him or who he was. There's lots of mythology and legend surrounding him, but he apparently ruled somewhere between 2700-2200 BC. He, or other kings of the period, started a lot of building projects and founded a lot of the cities of the area, including Babel and Uruch/Erech/Arak (where modern day Iraq gets its name). He started the building of many of the Ziggurats, including the most prominent one in Babel. The name Babel in ancient Mesopotamian means, "the Gate of God" and became a major trading place, bringing in people from all over the middle east, from as far as Egypt and the Indus River Valley in modern day Pakistan.

This is just a re-creation of the lowest layer of an ancient Ziggurat, it likely had several step-layers on top of this and a temple shrine at the very top. These were enormous structures for ancient times. 

Ziggurats had a different purpose than the tomb-pyramids of Egypt. The stories go that Nimrod and other kings began building them as a way to escape the floods imposed by God for punishing the people. They didn't have to be all good and righteous to escape flooding and punishment, they could take care of themselves, all on their own. A sort of man-made high ground. And like all rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates were prone to regular natural floods that could wipe out whole cities. They became, of sorts, a "middle finger to God" dedicated to their own gods.

The Ziggurat in Babel eventually became the biggest during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, though not much of it is left, mostly a large mound of eroded bricks and sand. Ziggurats were prone to erosion and collapse since they were made out of bricks, not stone.

The Tigris and Euphrates valley had two dominating languages at the time: Akkadian, spoken by the "empire" further upriver, towards Iran, and Sumerian, spoken by the people closer to the Persian Gulf in modern day Iraq. The Akkadians began moving down river into the area of Babel, bringing their language with them, eventually getting rid of and absorbing the Sumerian language completely. In the confusion and cultural upheaval, many Sumerians left Babel and scattered, including, apparently, the Jaredites and their families. As Hebrew evolved as a language, over the next thousand years, the word Babel came to mean, "Confusion".

Ship-building was invented by the Egyptians and used by the cities and nations around the Persian Gulf to aid in the trading between the Mesopotamians and the Indus River valley people. Not just reed-rafts, but actual, water-tight boats, like we think of them today. Often called, barges, because they were normally broad and long and open on top. Not real sea-worthy, but excellent for rivers and inland seas.

An Egyptian Barge from around 2500 BC

It was in this setting and circumstance that the Jaredites felt fear for losing their language and culture and praying to God for guidance whether to stay or go. God told them to go, and they traveled further upriver, up the "Valley of Nimrod", building barges and boats along the way. Where they went after they traveled upriver, is just about anyone's guess.

Only in the recent several hundred years had humans domesticated animals and plants, and the Jaredites were not strangers to this practice. They brought with them all the seeds of the plants they were used to growing, and all the animals they were used to having. Honey bees were first domesticated in and around Mesopotamia and Egypt just a few hundred years before the Jaredites, and the Jaredites brought them as well.

Glass adds an interesting bit to the Jaredite story. Glass was invented around what is now coastal Syria, not far from northern Israel. The first glass was used for beads as decoration and currency, or as very crude and rudimentary dishes. It wasn't used for windows until around 100 BC by the Romans, and only by the extremely wealthy. And glass was usually very colored and non-transparent, unless it was a very pure quartz sand, heated to extremely high temperatures. I was told by a class-member after my lesson the other day, that he lived in Saudi Arabia for a time. Many of his friends would drive out into the Arabian desert after a big lightning storm and go look for "sand diamonds".

State-of-the-art glass ear-studs from 2000-1500 BC (photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

So the Jaredites would have known about glass and glass-making, but only for rudimentary purposes. It was quite a feat for the brother of Jared to create and melt 16 small stones as transparent glass.

If glass wasn't used for windows in the Jaredites' time, it definitely wouldn't have been used regularly as a window in Noah's time. Most window coverings were made out of hide, leather, fabric, or paper. Sometimes clay tablets were used. Not anything worthy of an extended ocean-voyage. When God was giving the Brother of Jared instructions about the upcoming barge trip, it was clear that God wanted them to build barges that could take a beating out in a wide-open ocean, especially if the trip was going to be purely storm and wind-driven (no sails!!). No windows, and very likely, the doors would have been sealed to prevent leaking and water coming in. Only small, easily stoppable openings in the top and bottom. Imagine how frightening the open ocean would have been for this group of people who only knew the relatively calm, enclosed waters of rivers and inland seas/lakes!

The LDS edition of the Old Testament has a footnote regarding the window in Noah's ark. Many Rabbis and ancient Jews believed that Noah was given a glowing stone that he set into the ark for light, because, like the Jaredites, Noah was building an ark that could take a beating out on an open ocean and had to be sealed shut. The Brother of Jared, must have known his scriptures and took some inspiration from the story when he asked God to give them a similar gift.

So imagine the faith of the Brother of Jared! He's about to commit his entire tribe to some floating caskets, full of animals and each other, closed up except for some holes for air (and probably) disposing waste), under the direction of a talking cloud who says he is going to blow them through severe storms and waves, to a far-off promised land. He probably felt fairly hopeful and anxious about God giving them these glowing stones, and had the boldness to ask for it.

And compare this faith with the "faith" of the Babylonians that they'd just removed themselves from. The people who didn't want to exercise faith, who would rather build their own security and protection in the form of a tower or pyramid and worship the way they felt like. I can't blame them, that's pretty typical human nature, to want to be self-sufficient.

Babel was one of the choicest lands on the planet at the time, and here was God telling them he had another choice land for them, somewhere else, far away.

There's so much more to this story that we talked about on Sunday, but for those of you reading this, I'll end this here, and give a final point to ponder about how well the Jaredite story fits into actual history. I love history, I love learning and reading. I got to receive a fantastic advanced education and training in all sorts of sciences, and I spend my spare time watching educational Youtube videos. Only now am I putting this together myself.

And yet there are those out there who want us to believe that the writing of the Book of Mormon is some sort of "miraculous accident" of either a "prodigy" or "fraud" named Joseph Smith, who only had access to only a limited few books -and probably no access to a world atlas- during his childhood which probably weren't accurate with what we know now about ancient history, since archaeology -especially that of the Middle East- wasn't probably a popular science at the time. True, we know some of this story from the Bible, but the Book of Ether gives a number of other details that weren't included, yet fit so well.

I don't mean to take away our faith in the Book of Mormon and replace it with "proof". But I hope that by learning and studying, our faith turns to knowledge, and our faith grows further into new knowledge, much like the Brother of Jared's did, when he faithfully asked for a glowing stone that he'd studied about, and was then able to learn about the TRUE nature of God and the history of the world.

Keep studying!


Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and LDS.org
Photo of Egyptian Khufu boat:
By Bradipus - assumed (based on copyright claims). - No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=134281