Jared
This story is interesting because it shows two different accounts of what God did with the people involved with the tower of Babel. It seems that God is a god of confusion with his people if you believe the Mormon version.
As it turns out, Jared and his family are the only ones in the whole world that didn’t have his language confounded when God scattered the people at the time of the tower of Babel. After Jared told his brother to pray that God wouldn’t confound their language, they somehow miraculously realized that God heard the brother of Jared’s cry. It’s also interesting to note that Jared’s brother never seems to have his own name.
Joseph Smith claims the people that descended from Jared are called the Jaredites. The Jaredites had grown to become a great god-fearing nation which moved to the Americas, thus the Book of Mormon.
After many generations and hundreds of years they were destroyed by civil wars caused from the disobedience unto the Lord.
Ether 1:33-4 says; “Which Jared came forth with his brother and their families, with some others and their families, from the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people, and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered upon all the face of the earth; and according to the word of the Lord the people were scattered. And the brother of Jared being a large and mighty man, and a man highly favored of the Lord, Jared, his brother, said unto him: Cry unto the Lord, that he will not confound us that we may not understand our words.”
Verse 35 tells us their language wasn’t confounded. Then they prayed even their friends’ language wouldn’t be confounded and theirs was spared as well. The Bible has always told us two things for sure:
God is not the author of confusion. 1 Corinthian 14:33 says; ‘For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints.’ And then in Acts 10:34 we have Peter telling us that God is no respecter of persons.
With these two simple things in mind, why would God decide the rules were different for some and not all? What was so different about Jared and his non-named brother that they and their friends didn’t have the same treatment?
Did you notice what it said in Ether 1:33? Let’s take a look at it again! It says; “…at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people, and swore in his wrath that they should be scattered.”
Two more things come to mind when I read this passage.
1-God can’t be trusted. If God ‘swore in his wrath’ that they would be scattered and he confounded the language then went back on what he said, it’s likely that he could be bought off the next time I sinned.
2-Did he or did he not confound the language? If he confounded the languages and then Jared’s brother started praying, did God have to give them back their languages? Call me picky, but I think that knowing the God I worship is a serious business and I want to make sure I know it intimately!