The Epic Literature of the Book of Ether
[Migrations Caused by Unusual Weather]
[Barges Built with Special Instructions]
[Something Forced the Jaredites to Move With Everyone Else]
[Shallow Draft Boats Built Only for Western Asia]
243 Let’s turn to Ether now. The word Ether, ATHIRA, means “the one who left a trace, the one who left his mark or left a record.” In all Semitic languages it’s the same, and it means “to leave a track, to trail somebody.” He left his tracks in the sand, but it was the brother of Jared that left most of them.
243 This takes us to a new setting, as we said. Imagine having finished 1 Nephi of how they trek through the desert. In that marvelous account of how they go through the desert, everything is very accurate.
243 But having done, having made that [Lehi] epic story, what about changing the whole thing entirely, as we say here? Now imagine any man insane enough to try after such colossal exertions to write another such story of equal length and detail (the book of Ether is about the same as 1 Nephi, you see), but this time about a totally different race of people living in an age far removed from any other and in a wholly different geographical setting. Everything is different in the book of Ether, except the plot. The plot’s the same, and it works out the same. So what’s going on? Why is it the same? Because it’s always been the same—we’ll see that. Not even Joseph Smith ever called attention to this prodigious feat that he’s done here—the man who wrote the Book of Mormon. Yes, but who wrote the book of Ether? Well, he couldn’t have gotten any help from those sources.
243 Now every century sees its wars, its treaties, and the troubles and the affairs of men—”yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward” [Job 5:7]—the same types of trouble, the same types of jealousy, the same types of passion. As Ecclesiastes says, nothing changes. It’s always the same baloney. This world is always that way, but always in a different setting. This is the point. The setting does make a difference, and we’re going into a different setting ourselves. That’s why the book of Ether is important, because everything shifts into a climatic change and everything else. So the test of a historical document isn’t that it tells you of wars and alarms and rumors of wars, but the setting it puts it in. I mean those casual details that could only be noted by one who was on the scene. It couldn’t have been invented by anyone; only an eyewitness could have them. The story of Jared is a marvelous example of that.
243,244 There’s nothing original in that story of Lehi leaving Jerusalem and wandering through the desert. We’ve seen that with the Jaredites, but it was also the same in the case of Noah, Enoch, Abraham, Moses, and the Church in the Wilderness, and the Latter-day Saints coming west, etc. It’s the same epic of Das Wandernde Gottesvolk. In fact, Kasemann wrote a famous book on that subject, God’s Wandering People. They’re always chased out into the desert. This is the same sort of thing. But what strange institutions and practices we find in the book of Ether. It’s all very different.
244 How can we ever be able to check up on such stuff? Well, we can do it. First there is the driving force of the whole thing. In 1966 I wrote an article for a journal. I have been writing quite a bit on the Asiatic background of very early history, and this talks about the migrations that have occurred from time to time. In the present century, the 1930s, H. Munro Chadwick (Chadwick’s an important name here if you’re going to study the book of Ether) and his wife, who worked with him on these things, pointed out what should have been obvious to everybody all along. All the great civilizations begin with an epic literature, a type of literature known as epic. It’s quite different from all the others, and he pointed out that it couldn’t possibly be faked. There are fake epics. The Aeneid, The Luciad, and Ossian are good examples. People try to fake epics, but you can’t fake them. It sticks out all over the place, this heroic poetry.
244,245 When I wrote this, I had no idea of the Book of Mormon in mind. Ether never occurred to me until after a doubletake. After the waters of the flood had subsided, there came the great wind floods. There are the three great floods. The flood of water, the flood of wind, and the last will be the flood of fire. This was the great wind flood which converted large areas all over the world into sandy deserts. Haldar considers the Sumerian version of the wind flood to be an excellent example of a text describing historical events in terms of religious language. We get that in the book of Ether, too. These things are not only recorded, but they are recorded geologically. Historical reality is attested by wind-blown deposits being studied everywhere—especially by the Dutch, because all Holland was one of those deposits—can be broadly correlated in some of the major migrations of people. Well here I have a very long footnote with all sorts of references. When the ice thawed in the last Ice Age, great winds blasted out from that, carrying this fine glacial dust that was deposited as loess in China, and on the eastern side in the Hungarian Basin and in eastern Europe and in western China. There were these great deposits of lace from the dust being blown. But the thing is that we get a lot of this in [other places]—we certainly get it in Egypt.
245 [Quoting Samuel Noah Kramer] “They were the same characteristic features at work in the ancient Near East as a whole in the earliest recorded times. These factors are always accompanied and aggravated, if not caused, by violent and prolonged atmospheric disturbances,” he said. “Wherever we turn, the earliest records of the race offer a surprisingly uniform portrait of the wandering, storm-driven hero.”
245 Of course we would naturally include Tared and the brother of Jared. There’s Horus, Enlil, Marduk, Mazda, Zeus, Teshub, the Celtic Mercury, and the Norse Odin, to name but a few. He is mounted on his thunder wagon, leading his toiling hosts across the windy steppes while the earth trembles and the sky gives forth with appalling electrical displays. There are lots and lots of references here; if you want me to read them I will. No point to that. But you’re getting a standard situation here, and somehow this is going to concern us. What is it that drives them? This hostile planet we’re living on. Well, we say the wind, etc. Here we get it very clearly stated in the book of Ether.
245 The burans of Asia are terrible at all times. Ancient and modern travelers tell almost unbelievable but uniform tales of those appalling winds that almost daily shift vast masses of sand, dust, and even gravel from one part of the continent to the other. Of course, nobody goes out at 4:00 P.M. in the summertime in Egypt because of the violent winds. The KHAMSIN is going to begin now, the fifty-day wind that blows the sand and the gravel. That’s why there’s [only] heavy sand left. You walk on a crust of very coarse sand because all the fine stuff has been blown for thousands of years. And it has exposed all the stuff lying around. The great loess deposits on the eastern and western fringes of the vast area bear witness to even more dreadful dust storms (just after the Flood) that accompanied the drying up of the land after the glacial epic. But it is when the world’s weather gets out of hand, as it has a number of times in the course of history, that the blowing sands of Asia bring mighty empires to ruin, bury great cities almost overnight, and scatter the tribes in all directions to overrun and submerge the more favored civilizations of the east and west.
245 It’s a very interesting thing. All the diggings and works that have been piled up in previous years by BYU couldn’t be found anymore. They’re completely covered under the sand, so these things just pass away. The weather of Asia is the central driving mechanism of world history. Huntington did a famous study on climate and civilization that came out in the thirties and was quite sensational. Professor Huntington’s study showed that the driving clock of history is the climate. There are certain things you can’t do when the weather misbehaves.
246 It is only in recent years that men have begun to correlate the great migrations of history, with their attendant wars and revolutions, with those major weather crises such as the great wind and drought of 2300-2200 B.C., the terrible droughts of 1700 B.C., the world floods of 1300 B.C., the great drought of 1000 B.C., the FIMBULWINTER of 850 B.C., or the terrible winter of 1600 at the time of Elizabeth I, when the Thames seems to have frozen right to the bottom.
247 Ether 2:16,17,24,25 So we have in the history of the Jaredites a very freakish state of things. The Lord commanded Nephi to build a ship, you know, but it was an ordinary ship. Lehi’s people had to cross water at least twice as much—probably three or four times as much—as the Jaredites. They took the short North Pacific route. But the Jaredite ships were altogether unusual vessels. The Lord gave the builder special instructions for every detail. They had to be submersible yet ride very lightly on the surface of the waves. They were small, and they were light upon the water, we’re told, yet built to stand terrific pressure—exceedingly tight, tight like unto a dish, with special sealed vent holes that could not be opened when the water pressure on the outside was greater than the air pressure within. The Lord explained that it would be necessary to build such peculiar vessels because he was about to loose winds of incredible violence that would make the crossing a frightful ordeal at best. Any windows, he warned, would be dashed to pieces. Fire would be out of the question. Ether 2:24-25: “Ye shall be as a whale in the midst of the sea; for the mountain waves shall dash upon you.... Ye cannot cross this great deep save I prepare you against the waves of the sea, and the winds which have gone forth, and the floods which shall come. Therefore what will ye that I should prepare for you that ye may have light when ye are swallowed up in the depths of the sea?”
247 Ether 6:5-8 See, the book of Ether enters right into the scene. This is exactly the situation we find, this violence etc., and the Lord talking. You say, well how could they endure? Ether 6:8 says, “The wind did never cease to blow towards the promised land while they were upon the waters.” That’s 344 days of these violent winds. Verses 5-6: “And it came to pass that the Lord God caused that there should be a furious wind blow upon the face of the waters, . .. and they were many times buried in the depths of the sea, because of the mountain waves which broke upon them, and also the great and terrible tempests which were caused by the fierceness of the wind.”
248 Well, this is a significant thing, this setting we’re going to get here [in Ether]. This gives us what we call the Heroic Age. What type of world was the Heroic Age? What is the evidence for heroic ages and what characterizes them? Kramer says it’s contained in the fragments of nine epic poems from the Sumerians and shows that in their early histories as the Sumerians pass through a cultural stage now commonly known as the Heroic Age. You’ll notice everything about the book of Ether is the Heroic Age. It starts out with a superhero, the brother of Jared.-The hero is never the leader; he always is the brother of the leader. It’s a very interesting thing that they follow into this pattern. The secondary hero is a relative and does glorious things, but he’s not the king or the leader. He’s a rather colorless character. Who was Jared? What did he do? Ah, but the brother Jared—we know all about him.
248 What are the characteristics? We can go through and list some of the stock characters of heroic ages. (This is from Chadwick.) First of all, “The Heroic Age coincided with a period of upheaval.” Well, that should be clear by now, and certainly clear from the book of Ether. They have to leave—they don’t want to leave. Then we get this violent weather: “a period of upheaval generally known as the age [a bad translation, but we can’t do any better] of the national migrations.”
248 The “swarming time” it’s called. There are times when all the people in the world are in motion— this has happened.
248 The background that produces the epic milieu is the Heroic Age, and that’s what we’re dealing with here, because it has heroic dimensions. It’s tragic, it’s gloomy, and people live terrible lives. It’s an awful time. Remember what Goethe says about the Iliad and Homer? He says, “The Iliad proves to us that life on this earth is a hell” And it is—there’s nothing happy about the Heroic Age, believe me.
248,249 Then Kramer says “The factors primarily responsible for the more characteristic features of the Heroic Age are two: in the first place, heroic ages coincide with a period of national migrations, a wandering of the people. Secondly, and this is by far more significant, these people have come in contact with civilized power in the process of disintegration.” World civilization is collapsing, and that’s why they have to move. Everybody has to move. “The reports come from all sides on this.”
249 Either 1:33-37 Or especially if they get beaten. Then you belong to the other person, as it’s set forth very clearly in the book of Ether. Well, in every case something forced them to move, whenever these people are on the move. It certainly did the Jaredites. If they come to the stage rather shabbily equipped, it’s not because they began life that way but because something happened that made them pull up stakes in a hurry and clear out with just enough stuff for a forced march. You have to leave behind what you had. That’s too bad—you have to junk it. We see that’s going to happen. Remember, these people are not habitual nomads. They are moving because they have to. Remember the brother of Jared? Please, ask the Lord not to make us move if we don’t have to. If we have to, then he says,’ give us a promised land and see to it that we will not be confounded. When people are confounded, that’s when the language is confounded. He says the people are confounded here, and that’s what makes it happen. In every case they’re looking for lands to settle.
250 [Quoting Chadwick?] “Now it is granted that these people, wherever they go, find civilization in the process of disintegration.” Everything is disintegrating wherever they go, so it’s easy to overrun—or is it? It’s a time of world calamity. What reason have we, therefore, to doubt that it was the disintegration of their own less stable civilization that forced them to move in the first place? If they move in on a world in collapse, you can be perfectly sure they left one behind as well. Otherwise they would never have migrated. And the evidence? Well, the mere fact that our heroes do not enjoy what they are doing. They want to get the business over and settle down as soon as possible.
250 The third point that Chadwick makes is, “Epic is concerned not only with individuals, but primarily with individuals who are princes. The cast of characters consists almost wholly of princes and their military followers [as the book of Ether does]. Among these there is usually one character whose adventures form the chief subject of interest [another score, you see]. He’s always a mortal and human, and he always occupies a position of subordination [that’s an interesting thing because that’s exactly what the brother of Jared does—he’s not the leader, but he’s the only one we hear about] taking orders from a relatively colorless king or commander.” Remember, it’s Jared who says to his brother, go and ask the Lord whether we’ll have to move or not. It’s the brother of Jared who asks him, but his brother commands him to. Well, why is it called the book of Ether instead of Mahonri Moriancumr, or whatever it was. Well, because he was the first in the patriarchal line; he was the oldest. That’s why the book’s named after him, and the people are the people of Ether, but it’s the other one who is the hero.
251 [Quoting Chadwick?] He “takes orders from a relatively colorless king or commander. He is almost superhuman but never supernatural [again, his strength] and yet from time to time he receives supernatural aid— altogether a strange and impressive figure.”
251 It’s rather remarkable that the only really heroic figures in the Book of Mormon are found in Ether. Lehi, Nephi, King Benjamin, King Noah are certainly great men, but they’re not out-sized the way the heroes are in the book of Ether. Now this is an interesting thing, too, that’s characteristic of the book of Ether. We’re quoting from Chadwick: “Even though the most ferocious and even depraved characters occupy the stage of epic, there is no character who appears uniformly in an unfavorable light.” They’re all human beings, and their weaknesses are all recognized, but nobody is completely vicious as we like to imagine our enemies, totally depraved. We’re the totally good; they are the totally bad. There is none of that in it because, after all, they have a common experience.
251 We find it also true of the Jaredite monsters. Well, there’s a touch of admiration—even sympathy—for Shiz and Coriantumr, these heroes in the Book of Mormon. The licentious tyrants like Noah and Riplakish are not only real patrons of the arts, they have a touch of real magnificence. Chadwick rings a bell here. He says, “The behavior of the heroes often strikes the reader as childish or brutal. But in their dealings with one another a dignified and fastidious tone prevails, even between bitter rivals.” All throughout the book of Ether, you challenge a person to a duel. He doesn’t have to have the duel, but the story of Ether is one continual series of duels, as you know, but they’re on this chivalric level. Actually chivalry—people wandering around with their horses. So they put up with each other.
251 Chadwick says, “Warfare is an essential rather than an accessory of heroic life.” That leads to our next point, that “the scene of action in epics is confined exclusively to the battlefield, the court, the hunt, or some place of adventure, usually a wilderness.” Of course, when you say wilderness, that puts you in mind of Ether, and that’s fair game, too.
251 “But in this rough society, the cardinal virtues of the hero are courage, loyalty, and generosity. The courage- is strictly physical—bravery in the field. Loyalty is purely personal [as long as the person can hold it]. It involves duty or vengeance as well as protection. As to generosity, it’s always a matter of policy—the generosity of a chief to his followers, a princely bribe with admitted intent to buy and support supporters by gifts. That’s why you’re running your raids—to get the junk to pay the people.
251,252 I’ll quote this one from Chadwick because it’s so close to our Ether book. “Plunder is a necessity for the hero who wishes to maintain an active force of armed followers. Plundering raids appear to be a characteristic feature of the Heroic Age everywhere. Indeed, we may say an essential feature. The booty derived therefrom enabled active and ambitious princes to attract to themselves and maintain large bodies of followers without which they were at the mercy of their neighbors.”
252 Ether 1:1,5,16,23,33 Before I go on with this other stuff, why does this apply to us? Well, look at our book of Ether here now. He starts out with that negative tone. Notice the first verse. (You better have your Book of Mormon because we’re on Ether now. We have a very convenient handbook to go by.) Moroni is giving the “account of those ancient inhabitants who were destroyed . . . upon the face of this north country” [Ether 1:1]. See, they make the north crossing. They belong in the north country. He took them from the 24 plates of the book of Ether. The first part of the record he’s leaving out—that’s biblical. Verse 5: “I give not the full account, but a part of the account I give, from the tower down until they were destroyed.” Then he gives this long genealogy, but notice occasionally he says, as in verse 16, “And Aaron was a descendant of Heth, who was the son of Hearthom.” Descendants—you could introduce 20 generations between if you wanted to. Then you come down to verse 23: “And Morianton was a descendant of Riplakish.” Riplakish—there’s a good archaic name, “lord of Lakish.” There are at least five ancient cities named that. In fact the oldest city in Mesopotamia is supposed to have been called Lakish. This is Riplakish, which means “lord of Lakish.” He was a descendant of Riplakish. Let’s not worry about chronology here. It goes way back; I can tell you that. The Lord “swore in his wrath [now we’re getting this grim, heroic situation] that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth.”
252 Ether 1:34 “And the brother of Jared being a large and mighty man [notice, this is the brother of Jared who is going to be the hero now] highly favored of the Lord, Jared, his brother said unto him: Cry unto the Lord.” See, he has to ask his brother to do it, but it’s by way of command. He’s the one who gives orders here. He said, “Cry unto the Lord, that he will not confound us.” Our words will only be confounded if we’re confounded. Confound means “to mix up together.” If we get mixed together with other people (of course they’re speaking different dialects and languages), we’ll have an awful time trying to understand each other. It’s very much like the ward in Cairo where we have a dozen African languages there, and some of them speak nothing else. We have services in Arabic, and we’re confounded and mixed up. We have an awful time understanding each other. That’s what they’re talking about here—what happened at the tower when people were forced to move. “Cry again unto the Lord.” Notice, this is going to be a large migration, and he is going to get a company. He’s not like Lehi, a family job. This is something else.
252 Ether 1:37-41 “And it came to pass that the brother of Jared did cry unto the Lord, and the Lord had compassion upon their friends and their families also, that they were not confounded [it’s going to be a large group that moves out]. ... Go and inquire of the Lord whether he will drive us out of the land, and if he will drive us out of the land, cry unto him whither we shall go [if he does]. And who knoweth but the Lord will carry us forth into a land which is choice above all the earth?” When they looked for a promised land, they didn’t very often find it. That’s when they wandered. Remember, he visits the queen in Carthage, and he says, “Through various violent experiences, through rough clashes and wars, struggles against nations, so many showdowns and fights, we are looking for a place where we can find a quiet place to settle [which is to become glorious Rome], whose empire will terminate only with the bounds of the ocean and whose glory shall reach beyond the stars.” This is the promised land theme. They all have this promised land theme, because if you were wandering, you were cast out, you’d want to go to a better land. You’d want a good one and would say, for heaven’s sake, when can we settle? When will we be in Zion? When will we reach there? So this happens again. They’re doing it all the time. Will it be a land choice above all the others? Verse 40: “And it came to pass that the Lord did hear the brother of Jared [and this is what he says]: .. . Go to and gather together thy flocks.” Notice they move on a vast front.
253 Ether 1:41-43 So he goes on in this first chapter, “Gather together thy flocks, both male and female, of every kind; and also of the seed of the earth of every kind; and thy families; and also Jared thy brother and his family [get everybody together you can—see, this is going to be a big crowd]. . . . Thou shalt go at the head of them down into the valley which is northward.” Then it says “where there never had man been.” I’m leaving out all sorts of things here. Verses 42-43: “And there will I meet thee . .. and raise up unto me . . a great nation. And there shall be none greater.” This is what they wanted.
253 Ether 2:1-3 So they “went down into the valley which was northward,” which was the valley of Nimrod. It’s very interesting that in the north end of Mesopotamia all the places bear the name Nimrod. There’s Bir Nimrod and dozens of Nimrod names up north in Mesopotamia where you go through. Then you go east and what do you do? You cross many waters. “And they did also lay snares and catch fowls of the air; and they did also prepare a vessel, in which they did carry with them the fish of the waters [we give examples of these things]. And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee.” We mentioned the fact that deseret is the mystic, secret name given to the honey bee by the Egyptians, too. The Egyptians were moving in the same direction. They moved with the honey bee. He was their leader when they moved in the other direction. They moved toward the southwest, and these people moved toward the northeast in opposite directions. Remember, it was the descendant of Noah, Egyptus, who led her people into Egypt. They settled there in the opposite direction at this time, and deseret was their beacon, their sign.
253 You can see the family about ready to depart; they’ve packed all the baggage and everything for all these people. Somebody is running around among the wagons saying, “What happened to little deseret?” Deseret always gets lost when they’re going to go. It means “hives of bees,” and they do take hives of bees with them. It’s a very interesting thing. You remember there were no bees in the New World. There were no bees in Mesopotamia until quite late. Bees were first found in Palestine and Egypt. They’re not spread around universally, as you might think. In the Chilam Balam you’ll find them in the New World when they were brought here. It’s very interesting, the distribution of bees. There’s been a good deal written about that.
253,254 Ether 2:5-7 But anyway, the Lord talked with the brother of Jared, and they went “forth into the wilderness, yea, into that quarter where there never had man been.” Well, you get the idea that there’s quite a world population at this time, but they went into virgin territory where there’d never been anyone. As they traveled in the wilderness, they built shallow barges. A very recent National Geographic, which I wish I’d brought along, shows the shrinking of the great Aral Sea in Central Asia. It’s just east of the Caspian, which is practically shrinking to nothing. That’s a huge sea. There were these huge shallow seas. Then you go further west, and there are many seas. All of western Asia was drying out at this time. In 1906 Raphael Pompelli—we have his vast work published by the Smithsonian here—made an exploration of those central Asiatic regions, and it was all shallow water. It was all under water. Well, they still tell you in documentaries about a wandering lake in central Asia. Because of the winds the lake actually wanders around. It’s so shallow. It was full of shallow water, and at the time of the Jaredites, just after the flood, they seemed to be much deeper, but they built these barges of shallow draft because they had to cross a lot of water on their passing. Then when they got to the ocean they had to build a different type of boat entirely. But all these things that he’s talking about are geographically correct.
254 These things are really quite remarkable that Joseph has given us here, you know. The Lord talked to him, and they built their many barges. But you’ll notice (verse 7), he “would not suffer that they should stop beyond the sea in the wilderness.” They had to cross the Caspian, which was a vast sea at that time, twice as large, at least 2,000 miles long. It was huge, and after they’d crossed it, he said they had to keep going. They hadn’t arrived yet. So that’s the picture we get.