Jaredites, Mulekites, and Nephites: Covenant People of the New World: A Bridge

After the death of Shiz on the Hill Rama,Jaredite king, Coriantumr was found by another group of people who left Jerusalem at roughly the same time as Lehi and his family.  This group of exiles spirited away with them the young - perhaps even infant - son of King Zedekiah, a child named Mulek. They wanted to keep alive a descendant of King David.  They traveled by an ocean route that we do not know and landed in a place on the eastern shores of Central America.  The only thing we know about them is that they occupied a land covered with serpents.* 


Coriantumr lived with the Mulekites until his death, leaving with them the history which had been chronicled by the Prophet Ether.

Many years later, the Mulekites were living in a place they called Zarahemla.  Descendants of the Prophet Nephi, under King Mosiah I.,  joined them.  While the two group lived separately within the land, eventually we hear nothing more of the Mulekites as they were also numbered among the Nephites.  Benjamin, son of Mosiah I., was named as king by all of the people, both Nephites and Mulekites. The Nephites translated the Jaradite records given to the Mulekites by Coriantumr and the Mulekites learned the gospel from these Nephites. The Nephites had records from the days of Lehi in Jerusalem and the Mulekites had no records of their own (exception being the Book of Ether, which is the record of the Jaredites and not of the Mulekites.) Therefore, they didn't know their own spiritual legacy.

To keep the genealogy of Abraham straight, the Mulekites were descendants of Judah and the Nephites were descendants of Joseph through his sons, Ephraim and Manasseh. This is yet another example of the two scrolls becoming as one. (Ezekiel 37:16; 1 Nephi 23:23-24; 3 Nephi 16:1.) There is a chiasmus (Hebrew poetry) in the Book of Mormon that in the last days the Jews shall have the records of the Nephites and the Nephites shall have the record of the Jews.  It also refers to others of the House of Israel not in either Jerusalem nor Zarahemla, and these people shall keep records. I believe that we will have access to these records when God deems it appropriate that we have them  

The Jaredites from the Tower of Babel, of course, preceded Abraham and were not specifically of his covenant as were the Nephites and the Mulekites, but they were a people who knew God and whom God knew.  Jared's brother made a Covenant with God that they would serve Him if He did not confound their languages. This covenant contained much the same language as did God's Covenant with Abraham - Land, Posterity, Prosperity.

And the two scrolls became one.


*  Since the area of Mexico known as Cancun translated means land of snakes, that may have been the place the Mulekites landed (speculation on my part.)


© Kathleen Rawlings Buntin Danielson, December 2019