In Ether 9:31 we find that “there came forth poisonous serpents also upon the face of the land, and did poison many people. And it came to pass that their flocks began to flee before the poisonous serpents towards the land southward, which was called by the Nephites Zarahemla.”
Joseph Gorrell writes:
I am familiar with both serpents and flocks, and neither of them show behavior in the manner described above. That is, poisonous serpents do not pursue animals; they defend themselves against intruders, including animals. If in reality the flocks represent sheep or cattle, it is contrary to the way these animals react. They simply do not travel hundreds of miles just to get away from snakes.
He reasons that if the serpents and flocks are representative of specific groups of people (“flocks” tend to symbolize righteous people--Alma 5:59-60; and serpents could be symbolic of secret combinations, who spread their deadly poison among the people--note that in Ether 9, Heth became the king of the Jaredites and was directly involved with secret combinations), then this story might take on some new light. Moroni notes concerning the “flocks” that “there were many … which did perish by the way nevertheless; there were some which fled into the land southward” and the Lord stopped the poisonous serpents from pursuing them.
Many current Latter-day scholars see a strong relationship between the Jaredites and the Olmecs. Assuming a Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon, the distance from the Olmec center of San Lorenzo, Veracruz, located at the top of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, to Izapa, Chiapas on the Pacific coast, is about 250 miles. There are several sites on the Pacific coast of Chiapas and Guatemala that manifest a large Olmec influence beginning at about 1000 B.C. These sites include Izapa, La Blanca, Abaj Takalik, El Baul, Monte Alto, and Bilbao. These sites establish a coastal trail from Izapa to Kaminaljuyu. Kaminaljuyu is the area considered by many LDS scholars to be the city of Nephi, and also shows Olmec influence prior to 600 B.C.
Could the book of Ether imply that a remnant of the Jaredites traveled into the land southward prior to the coming of Lehi? Were there Jaredites at Izapa, a proposed landing site of the Nephites when Lehi and his people arrived?
It is interesting to note that when Nephi fled from the land of first inheritance, he noted that “all those who should go with me were those who believed in the warnings and the revelations of God, wherefore, they did hearken unto my words (2 Nephi 5:6). Is it possible that some of the people who listened to Nephi and went with them to settle in the land of Nephi (Kaminaljuyu) were none other than the descendants of the righteous flocks who had escaped the Jaredite heartland 400 years earlier? [Joseph C. Gorrell, ”Serpents and Flocks" in The Book of Mormon Archaeological Digest, Vol. III, Issue II, June 2001, pp. 12-13] [See the commentary on Jacob & Sherem--review of John Clark’s article, see the commentary on 2 Nephi 5:6]