The company of travelers “went down into the valley which was northward, (and the name of the valley was Nimrod, being called after the mighty hunter) with their flocks which they had gathered together, male and female, of every kind” (Ether 2:1). The valley appears to have been known because it carried a name—the name of Nimrod, the mighty hunter, a great-grandson of Noah (Gen. 10:1-9). The Jaredite group laid snares to “catch fowls of the air; and they did also prepare a vessel, in which they did carry with them the fish of the waters. And they did also carry with them deseret, which, by interpretation, is a honey bee; and thus they did carry with them swarms of bees, and all manner of that which was upon the face of the land, seeds of every kind” (Ether 2:2-3). All of these items are primary sources of portable food—fowls, fish, honey bees, flocks, and seeds. (For a discussion of the Jaredite animals see, Sorting out the Jaredite Animals, below)

The group then traveled northward through the valley of Nimrod and went “forth into the wilderness, yea, into that quarter where there never had man been. And it came to pass that the Lord did go before them, and did talk with them as he stood in a cloud, and gave directions whither [to which place] they should travel” (Ether 2:5). The crucial question at this point is: Which direction did the Jaredites travel to place them in a “quarter” of the land “where never had man been”? Because they were traveling northward, the empty or unpopulated quarter would have been either to the northwest or the northeast of the tower of Babel. According to the Book of Genesis, the ark of Noah landed “upon the mountains of Ararat” (Gen. 8:4). These mountains are located in eastern Turkey to the northwest of Babel, so the quarter of the land to the northwest, where Noah’s ark landed, would not have been an area “where there never had man been.” This leaves the northeast quarter as the only possible direction for a Jaredite route into an unpopulated northern quarter of the land as they departed the valley of Nimrod north of Babel, located south of present-day Bagdad (See Bible Dictionary, “Ararat,” and Map 9, “The World of the Old Testament,” in the LDS Bible Appendix).