Andrew Tobolowsky discusses View of the Hebrews and its historical context in relation to the Book of Mormon.

Date
2022
Type
Book
Source
Andrew Tobolowsky
Non-LDS
Hearsay
Direct
Secondary
Reference

Andrew Tobolowsky, The Myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel: New Identities Across Time and Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 157–159

Scribe/Publisher
Cambridge University Press
People
Ethan Smith, Joseph Smith, Jr., Andrew Tobolowsky
Audience
Reading Public
PDF
Transcription

As for the 1820s, which is when Joseph Smith Jr. began to receive his first visions, something of the flavor of the period can be felt in the newspapers of the day. To take just one example, a piece composed in the Philadelphia Recorder in 1826 describes a native chief’s response to the effort by American authorities to establish schools in his region. The chief told the story of two brothers, one “red-skinned” and one white, whose old, blind father offered a book to whichever of them first killed a deer and prepared it for him. The white-skinned brother cheated and won the contest, and his father’s blessing, while the red-skinned brother lost, trying to play by the rules. “If this cheat had not been practiced,” the speech is supposed to have gone, “the red man would have been now as the white man is, and he as the red man . . . if the Great Spirit had intended that the red man should know how to read, he would not have allowed the white man to take this advantage of us.” Was there any doubt, the Recorder author wondered, that here was a native memory of the biblical story of Jacob and Esau, and therefore “circumstantial testimony in favour of the opinion, that the savages of our country are descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel?”

Similarly, just before the Book of Mormon itself appeared, a Massachusetts clergyman named Ethan Smith (unrelated to the soon-tobe prophet) published, in 1823, A View of the Hebrews, which Joseph Smith Jr. was occasionally accused of cribbing from. Ethan Smith claimed that he knew that the natives told tales of a great flood, and a god named “Ale, the old Hebrew name of God, and Yoheweah.” He believed they did not eat “the hollow of the thigh of an animal,” as the Israelites had not since Jacob’s fight with the angel in Genesis 32, and that they were aware that, once upon a time, they had practiced circumcision. He also pointed to the text of 2 Esdras, the work of the apocrypha discussed in the last chapter. This text describes the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel as having gone on to a place called “Arzareth” (2 Esdr. 13:45–46) “through the narrow passages of the Euphrates” (13:44), and from there, to a journey that took an entire year and a half to complete (13:45).

Where, Ethan Smith wondered, could the Israelites have gone that took so long, save for America itself? And hadn’t the prophet Amos referred to some future day when the Israelites “shall wander from sea to sea,” seeking the word of YHWH but without finding it? With the discovery of America, Smith argued, the day when the “most High will begin to rescue those who are on the earth” (2 Esdras 13:29), “collecting to himself . . . the ten tribes that were taken captive from their land in the days of King Hoshea, whom King Shalmaneser of the Assyrians took across the river as a captive” (2 Esdras 13:40), had begun, at last, to dawn.

Thus, when the Book of Mormon appeared, with its account of an ancient Israelite voyage from Israel to America, it would have resonated with what many Americans of the day already believed. At the same time, Mormon thought, which held that the restoration of Israel was the key to bringing about the Second Coming, has its roots in a Protestant theological outlook dating back at least to the days of Thorowgood and Durie. And as we will see in a moment, there were other ways in which early Mormonism resembled its roots, much as every vision of Israel is a product of its own context. Then there were the ways in which early Mormonism was utterly unique, ways that would deeply trouble those the Mormons lived among. And within fifteen years of its founding, Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr., would be dead, murdered by a mob, and his flock would be in flight across the border of America.

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