The Great Tower, identified with the Tower of Babel, is the structure from which the Jaredites departed when the Lord confounded the language of the people and scattered them across the earth (Ether 1:33). The biblical account places its building in the land of Shinar in Mesopotamia, a few generations after the flood, where the people set out to build a city and a tower “whose top may reach unto heaven,” intending to make a name for themselves and avoid being scattered (Genesis 11:4). The tower is held to have been a ziggurat, a stepped temple-tower of the Mesopotamian type.
The Lord went down, confounded the people’s language so they could not understand one another, and scattered them from there, ending the building of the city (Genesis 11:7-8). Helaman 6:28 attributes the tower’s construction to the adversary, who “put it into the hearts of the people to build a tower sufficiently high that they might get to heaven,” and who afterward led the people who came from the tower into the promised land.
Jared and his brother came forth from the great tower with their families, some others, and their families, at the time of the confounding (Ether 1:33). At Jared’s request, the brother of Jared cried to the Lord, who did not confound the language of Jared, his brother, or their friends and families (Ether 1:34-37). After the dispersion began, the Lord directed the company to gather their flocks, seeds, and families and travel north to a valley, where he would lead them to a land choice above all others (Ether 1:38-43).
Moroni²’s abridgment of the Ether record gives no account of the period from the creation of the world to the great tower, stating that the fuller account is had among the Jews, and writes only the part from the tower down to the destruction of the Jaredites (Ether 1:3-5). Mosiah²’s translation of the Jaredite record likewise traced their history back to the building of the great tower, when the Lord confounded the language of the people and scattered them (Mosiah 28:17).