The Book of Mormon offered as reasonable an explanation as any for the time. From the seventeenth century on, ministers in Europe and America had argued that the Indians were Israelites on the grounds of similarities in Hebrew and Indian culture. Increase Mather, Samuel Sewall, Samuel Willard, Jonathan Edwards, and Ezra Stiles had published such opinions, borrowing in part from European sources such as Thomas Thorowgood to prove their point. The idea received fresh impetus from James Adair's The History of the American Indians, published in London in 1775. Adair lived for forty years among the Indians as a trader before retiring to write his observations. Excited by Adair's evidence, Elias Boudinot, founder and first president of the American Bible Society, introduced a wide American audience to the theory of Israelite origins in his Star in the West, which appeared in 1816. Spurred by his work, other authors began combing accounts of Indian life in search of evidence. Ethan Smith, a minister in Poultney, Vermont, in View of the Hebrews, published in 1823, reviewed the findings of Adair and Boudinot and added evidence from many other sources. The reviews of View of the Hebrews (and presumably the sales) warranted an enlarged second edition in 1825. Josiah Priest, a man with his eye on the main chance, further complimented Smith by plagiarizing scores of pages in his own Wonder of Nature and Providence.

From one perspective, the Book of Mormon was one more account of Israel in America. But it would be a mistake to see the book as an imitation of these earlier works. Nor is there evidence of heavy borrowing from View of the Hebrews, as some critics have said. Comparison of the two works reveals too many fundamental differences.

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The excitement in Ethan Smith's book lay in the light it shed on an old puzzle-where were the lost ten tribes, that mysterious group who dropped out of history after their captivity in Assyria! And on this point the Book of Mormon was a disappointment. Lehi and his family were not the ten tribes. Lehi left for the new world 125 years after the Assyrian captivity and from Jerusalem, not Assyria. His people were never identified as the lost tribes. The ten tribes were mentioned, as Parley Pratt noted, by the Savior when he said he would visit them after he left the Nephites, but nothing was said of an American home for the tribes. They were another group, located in another part of the world. The Indians by the Book of Mormon account, rather than being the other half of ancient Israel, were descendants of a tiny band that slipped out of Jerusalem long after the ten tribes had disappeared.

Moreover, the Book of Mormon version of Indian origins contradicted much of Ethan Smith's scriptural evidence. One of the key proof texts in Ethan Smith's treatise did not work for the Book of Mormon. Lehi went south, not north, as Amos 8 prescribed, and stayed by the Red Sea before launching into the Indian Ocean rather than traveling from sea to sea. Nor were the cultural similarities of Indians and Hebrews entirely relevant. Ethan Smith piled up proofs of Indian practice of Mosaic ritual and law. Book of Mormon peoples abided by the Mosaic law until the coming of Christ, but Mormon buried that fact as if it were of little importance. Nephite prophets taught Christ and the resurrection. Sacrifices, feasts, temple worship, all the material evidence in View of the Hebrews received scant attention amidst the outpouring of sermons on salvation through Christ. After the appearance of the Savior the Mosaic law was abandoned altogether and presumably sifted out of Nephite culture. Almost everything Ethan Smith worked so industriously to prove, the Book of Mormon disproved or disregarded.

The critics have mistakenly searched too hard for specific parallels in the Book of Mormon and View of the Hebrews, while neglecting the moral purpose of Ethan Smith's work. Before he was historian or anthropologist, Smith was a preacher. The burden of his message was that the Indians were Israel, a branch of God's chosen people. The great promises made to them in the ancient covenants were soon to be fulfilled. The point for modern Americans was to pay attention to this benighted people. As a reviewer expressed it, the moral of the book was "the weight of obligation which now rests on Gentile Christians and eminently on American Christians to extend the gospel to the Jews."

If we are to ask where the Book of Mormon converged with the American culture of the 1830s, the theme of Israel's restoration is a better contact point than Ethan Smith's theory about the lost tribes. Smith attached the Indians to the destiny of the Jews to make proselyting among the tribes an aspect of the promised conversion of all Israel, and so did the Book of Mormon.

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The dedication on the title page of the Book of Mormon struck a familiar note in 1830. The record was "to show unto the remnant of the House of Israel what great things the Lord hath done for their fathers, and that they may know the covenants of the Lord, that they are not cast off forever—And also to the convincing of the Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, the Eternal God, manifesting himself unto all nations." Like Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, the Book of Mormon directed its readers to attend to lost Israel, whether Jew or Indian. The descendants of Lehi were not the lost ten tribes, as Indians were conventionally thought to be, but they were part of the diaspora. Jacob, Nephi's brother, spoke of many groups whom the Lord God has led away from time to time from the house of Israel" now scattered on "the isles of the sea!" "Yea, the more part of all the tribes have been led away," Nephi said, "and they are scattered to and fro upon the isles of the sea, and whither they are none of us knoweth, save that we know that they have been led away." Lehi was of the tribe of Joseph through his son Manasseh, and America, Lehi's promised land, was the isle to which God led him. The Book of Mormon's mission was to convert the Indian fragment of Israel along with all the other dispersed remnants, including Jews and the lost tribes. Many Americans besides Ethan Smith understood that mission and could believe in it. Here the book and its American environment did come together.