Page 17 - Insights Into The Scriptures - The Jaredites
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into the story. The fact that the end of the time of the Jaredites was after
the Mulekites’ arrival comes from only three short scriptures in Omni.
Omni 20 And it came to pass in the days of Mosiah, there was a large
stone brought unto him with engravings on it; and he did interpret the
engravings by the gift and power of God.
Omni 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.
Omni 22 It also spake a few words concerning his fathers. And his first
parents came out from the tower, at the time the Lord confounded the
language of the people; and the severity of the Lord fell upon them
according to his judgments, which are just; and their bones lay scattered in
the land northward.
Thus, the Jaredites could have existed as a nation for up to 450
years after the Mulekites came to America based on Mosiah’s reign being
the only certainty we have on the Jaredite timeline from the Mulekites. I
have reasons to doubt that it was more than about fifty years after the
Mulekites arrived before they found Coriantumr. I also want to be clear
that I am not saying that the different nations did not cross paths previous
to them finding Coriantumr. As I will show later, they likely did. But it
appears that Mormon is trying to keep his story Nephite-centric. Tangents
would likely lead away from his message and the lessons God is inspiring
him to teach us.
The key point is, the two bookends of the Jaredite’s existence, the
Tower of Babel, and the finding of Coriantumr by the Mulekites, give us
some idea of the length of the Jaredite nation’s existence. However,
because of the uncertainty of the exact years of these two events, this range
could be hundreds of years more or less than the 1600 years approximated
here. But, for sure, that existence was probably more than one and a half
millennia, a long time for a nation to exist. To put it into perspective,
that’s around eight times longer than the existence of the United States at
the time of the writing of this book.
There is another interesting way to look at the length of time the
nation existed. Thor Heyerdahl was one of the most famous archeologists
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