Ether

Ether is presented as Moroni's abridgment of an even older record than the rest of the Book of Mormon, the twenty four gold plates of a people the text calls the Jaredites. Where the Nephite record traces back to a family leaving Jerusalem around 600 BCE, the Jaredite record traces back further still, to a small group led by a man named Jared and his brother who leave the region of a great tower at the time the text places the confusion of languages, traveling first across a wilderness and then across an ocean in a fleet of small enclosed vessels called barges, sealed against water and lit by stones the text describes as touched and made to shine.

Once settled in a promised land, generally understood within the Book of Mormon's own geography to be the same land the Nephites and Lamanites later occupy, the Jaredites establish a kingdom that cycles repeatedly through righteousness, prosperity, pride and internal war, a pattern the abridged text narrates across many generations and numerous named kings, most of them known only through brief notices of their reigns rather than developed narrative.

Because the Jaredite record predates the Nephite one by more than a thousand years within the Book of Mormon's own chronology, Ether functions as a kind of deep background to the rest of the volume, a much older cautionary cycle of rise and total collapse that the Nephite narrative echoes rather than repeats exactly.

The most theologically significant episode in Ether belongs to Jared's unnamed brother, who prays for light for the barges before the ocean crossing and, in response, is shown the finger of the Lord touching sixteen small stones he has prepared, an encounter the text presents as so direct that his faith is described as parting a veil of unbelief, allowing him to see beyond the stones themselves to a fuller vision of the premortal Christ. This episode is read within Latter-day Saint tradition as one of the clearest visionary encounters recorded anywhere in the Book of Mormon, comparable in weight to the visions attributed to Nephi and Lehi at the opening of the volume.

Ether closes, like the Nephite record it parallels, with total destruction: the last two Jaredite kings, Shiz and Coriantumr, fight a war of mutual annihilation that ends with Coriantumr as the sole survivor of his people, later found and briefly sheltered by the people of Zarahemla generations before the Nephites themselves settle there, which is how the Book of Mormon's narrative frame connects the Jaredite and Nephite records despite Ether appearing near the very end of the compiled book.

Moroni frames his own abridgment of Ether as deliberately incomplete, stating that he does not include the full account of the brother of Jared's vision because it was commanded to remain sealed until a future time, which later Latter-day Saint tradition connects to a portion of the golden plates described as sealed and untranslated.