Traci Thomas compares the narrative styles of View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon.
Traci Thomas, "'Brought Forth at Some Future Day': Historical Narratives in the Book of Mormon, View of the Hebrews, and Manuscript Found," in Archive of Restoration Culture Summer Fellows' Papers 2000–2002, ed. Richard Lyman Bushman (Provo, UT: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, Brigham Young University, 2005), 1–6
In June 1842, the Nauvoo Times and Seasons ran a two-column quotation from Josiah Priest's American Antiquities, apparently in support of the Book of Mormon idea that the American Indians are descendants of the house of Israel. Interestingly, in the selected passages Priest himself quotes extensively from Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews. This early connection between an LDS publication and View of the Hebrews is notable because subsequent critics have frequently commented upon similarities between Ethan Smith's text and the Book of Mormon, with some suggesting that View of the Hebrews may have served as a source for Joseph Smith's work on the Book of Mormon. Similar claims concerning the Book of Mormon and its potential "sources" have also been posited in relation to Solomon Spaulding's Manuscript Found.
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His remarks on the records of the American Indians and the similarities they bear to Jewish scripture-remarks reprinted in the Times and Seasons-give one example of such proof. Clearly, the book was written with the intention of persuading readers that the American Indians are descendants of the house of Israel, and Ethan Smith validates his argument through classic persuasive techniques that certainly would have been familiar to nineteenth-century readers.
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The purposes, then, in preserving the various plates and records mentioned in the Book of Mormon include the desire to preserve a language, a particular representation of history, and a set of prophecies that is ultimately concerned with the salvation of future readers. Joseph Smith is thus situated as a restorer of these prophecies and the histories that contain them; a position that holds significant historical and eternal implications for readers of the Book of Mormon. Clearly, the structure and intent of View of the Hebrews are vastly different, as Ethan Smith's argument is one concerned only with establishing a specific claim about the American Indians and not with bringing men to salvation. It makes no claim of ancient origin, and its view of history is not concerned with spiritual implications for nineteenth-century readers. Historical narratives are referred to briefly within View of the Hebrews, but the existence of these records serves only as proof for the authors central claim, and the records referred to are of relatively little importance within the text itself. It is within the Book of Mormon alone that the idea of histories preserved through records takes upon itself an eternal sense of consequence.