The composition of the party is not given here, but the basic outlines are given in Ether 6:14. One of the important phrases in this verse is “also the friends of Jared and his brother and their families.” In keeping with the patriarchal emphasis in the record keeping of the Biblical peoples, the friends should be assumed to be male. They brought their wives with them, but the people who were counted were always the males. Thus when we are told that there are twenty-two friends in Ether 6:14, we are to understand that it is most probably that these were twenty-two males, and they were accompanied by their wives. Nevertheless, this original party of males and their spouses would have numbered twenty-four families, not a large migrating party.
Geographic: The story of Nimrod is closely associated with the Babylon, and travel northward through a valley would logically either consist of moving up the river valley of the Tigris or the Euphrates. (Hugh Nibley. Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites. Bookcraft, 1952, p. 175).
Chronological: The timing of the departure from the Tower would appear to be in the vicinity of 3000 BC. (John L. Sorenson. An Ancient American Setting for the Book of Mormon. FARMS 1985, pp. 116-7). However, the reconstruction of dates from the Jaredite kin-list cannot be reconstructed that far back in time. As noted following Ether 1:32, it is most probable that there are gaps in the king-list. Therefore Jared would be approximately at this time, and the chronology would lose nearly a thousand years of time somewhere later. Even though the king-list appears to make all of the connections, experience with multiple king-lists among the Maya suggest that such losses of names are not unusual (see Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens. Thames & Hudson, 2000, p. 102).