In the first paragraph Moroni informs us that the subject of his historical sketch is the ancient inhabitants who were destroyed “upon the face” of this “north country.” He is relating the tragic fate of that part of the Jaredites. In the fifth verse he adds that he does not copy the full account as committed to writing by Ether, but only a part of it.
The Jaredites, at the time of Ether, were widely scattered on the American Continents. All students of the Book of Ether agree on that. The divine promise to Jared, before he left for America, was, “There will I bless thee and thy seed, and raise up unto Me of thy seed, and of the seed of thy brother, and they who shall go with thee, a great nation. And there shall be none greater than the nation which I will raise up unto Me of thy seed, upon all the face of the earth.” This promise was fulfilled during the centuries that intervened between the arrival of Jared in America and the Battle of Ramah.
Orson Pratt says:
“In process of time they became a very numerous and powerful people, occupying principally North America; building large cities in all quarters of the land; being a civilized and enlightened nation.” (Remarkable Visions, Edinburgh, 1840)
President George Reynolds says:
“The contemporary nations on the Eastern Continent—Egypt, Chaldea and Babylonia—were insignificant when compared with the vast extent of territory held and filled by the Jaredites; they were the sole rulers of the whole Western Hemisphere, and possibly the originals whence arose the stories of the fabled Atlantis; for we have no account that God shut them out from the knowledge of the rest of mankind when He planted them in America, as He afterwards did the Nephites; and late researches have shown that the geographical knowledge of the ancients was much greater in the earlier ages than at the time of the Savior and a few hundred years previous to His advent.” (The Story of the Book of Mormon, p. 325, Edition of 1957)
When studying the Book of Ether it is important to remember that neither the original author, or authors, nor the later copyist, intended to produce a handbook on American archaeology or ancient ethnography; Ether gives, very briefly, some of the main historical features of the people governed by Jared and his descendants through Orihah. Of the descendants of the Brother of Jared we are informed that one of them, “a mighty man,” overthrew Moron, the grandfather of Ether, and kept him prisoner and his son, Coriantor, the father of the prophet, in captivity all their days. (Ether 6:16 we read that, “The friends of Jared and his brother were in number about twenty and two souls, and they also begat sons and daughters before they came to the Promised Land; and therefore they began to be many.” At the time of the Battle of Ramah there must have been Jaredites of the many various lineages in favorable locations all over the Western Hemisphere, as amply evidenced by shell heaps, mounds, and mysterious ruins in widely separated places.