Page 18 - Insights Into The Scriptures - The Jaredites

that ever lived. One of the things that made him good at historical
investigation was that he didn’t just try to figure things out by looking at
archeological facts, but he would also gather stories, legends, and history
as much as possible from the people in the area.
For his work in South America, he mentions that there was a
brown-man nation and a white-man nation that were constantly at war with
each other. This, of course, is very familiar to those who have read The
Book of Mormon. However, Heyerdahl was not a member of The Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and was not relying on The Book of
Mormon. He collected stories from the people who talked about how the
brown man eventually destroyed the white man. From the legends of the
people, he recorded the names of the chiefs back to that event, then
multiplied them by 25, the amount of time he felt would be an average for
the amount of time each chief would serve in that capacity. By doing this,
he determined that this great destruction of the white man occurred around
500 A.D. [10].
This method is amazingly close to what The Book of Mormon says.
But there are some challenges in using this method in the book of Ether.
First, what lineage we have is not just of the kings, but follows the
genealogy leading to Ether, the writer. Also, there could be gaps. In Ether
1, most of the lineage says that a man is “the son of” the one before. But a
few say that the man was “a descendant of” the person ahead of them. This
could mean there were multiple generations in between. This occurs three
times. They are listed here, along with information about the same men
that comes later in the book of Ether.

Table 1 - Descendants

Man/Descendant of Related Information Later in Ether
Ether 1:6 . . . He that wrote Ether 11:23 And it came to pass that
this record was Ether, and Coriantor begat Ether, and he died,
he was a descendant of having dwelt in captivity all his days.
Coriantor
Ether 1:16 And Aaron was Ether 10: 31 And he begat Heth, and Heth
a descendant of Heth. . . lived in captivity all his days. And Heth
begat Aaron. . .

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