The Jaredite History
The treasures Lehi found in the brass plates (see 1 Nephi 5:10–14) are paralleled in the book of Ether. The genealogy is included in the book of Ether in typical fashion of the ancients. Notice, however, that there seems to be gaps in the father-son lineages (“descendant” is used instead of “son” in Ether 1:6, 16, 23). Even then, there are at least thirty generations recorded. If we take forty years as a rough estimate of a generation, then the Jaredite history spanned at least twelve hundred years, perhaps many more, since some people after the Flood lived longer than we think of as normal today, and also because of the missing generations. We know that the Jaredite colony came to the promised land after the Flood, somewhere around 2200–2100 B.C. , and existed for at least some time after the Lehi colony arrived, 600 B.C. and later. Thus they probably lived here at least fifteen hundred years.
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