The title of this study belies its actual scope. While focusing primarily on the use of an Old Testament framework and Old Testament passages in the Book of Mormon–for which he provides a close analysis of the Isaiah passages found there, where they are compared with the King James Version–Reverend Walters also deals with the order in which the Book of Mormon was composed, the origin of the names in the Book of Mormon, and eschatological themes found in Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews and in the Book of Mormon. The appendices at the end of the thesis further reflect the wide swath that Reverend Walters intends to cut: "Authoritative 'Scriptures' of the Mormon Church"; "Preliminary Draft of Lucy Smith's History"; "Sources for Book of Mormon Names" ("Book of Mormon Names"; "Patterns in Non-Biblical Names"; "The Name Mormon"); "Checking Variances of Book of Mormon with King James Version-Book of Isaiah"; "Poultney Congregational Church Records"; "Comparison of Book of Mormon and King James Version."

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Joseph's eschatological framework in the Book of Mormon, according to Walters, is based on Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews. As elsewhere in Walters's thesis, I was struck in this section by the relative paucity of his footnotes and bibliography. This is particularly surprising since theses (and dissertations) tend to overdose on bibliography and footnotes, and the purported View of the Hebrews/Book of Mormon link is one of the best-trodden trails in anti-Mormon literature. While there is circumstantial evidence that Joseph Smith could have been acquainted with Ethan Smith's work (cf. pp. 97-99), "even if he had seen [the View of the Hebrews], that would prove nothing unless we could discover something in the Book of Mormon that could not possibly come from any other source." Walters himself admits that other writers of Ethan Smith's time "did join him in concurring with some" of what he calls "Ethan Smith's eschatological distinctives" (p. 99).

But as we look at Ethan Smith's "eschatological distinctives" in comparison with the Book of Mormon, the parallels begin to fray. Ethan Smith's view that the American Indians were the lost ten tribes (cf. pp. 102-3) simply does not square with the account in the Book of Mormon, Walters's efforts to prove the contrary notwithstanding (pp. 114-15). According to Walters, "The only difference [between the Book of Mormon view of the lost ten tribes and that in View of the Hebrews] is that Ethan located all of his lost tribes in America, while the Book of Mormon places only a portion of the tribe of Joseph here and the rest are pictured as hidden away from the knowledge of the Jews, somewhere else in the world" (p. 115). Even if we were to accept this statement as accurate, the difference between the two positions is vast, considering the central importance in View of the Hebrews of identifying the Indians with the lost ten tribes. But the association of the Lehite colony with the ten tribes is also misconceived (again, I feel no compulsion to accept Walters's interpretation of the Book of Mormon over my own, or over that of another believing Latter-day Saint). According to the Latter-day Saint historian Richard Bushman, "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."

But beyond putative "parallels" between the Book of Mormon and View of the Hebrews that flow from faulty or debatable exegesis, there are the mountains of "unparallels" that argue against Joseph's use of the book. Beyond these "unparallels," there is a further question that must be answered by proponents of the View of the Hebrews hypothesis: why do none of the early critics of the Book of Mormon mention Ethan Smith in their attacks on it? If the parallels are so evident, why weren't they noticed by individuals who were not only acquainted with Ethan Smith's book, but were also existentially interested in its claims? Why wasn't it prominently mentioned as a source for the Book of Mormon until the beginning of the twentieth century, when the book itself had only an antiquarian interest and its contents were no longer so widely a part of popular discussion? My suspicion is that what appear today to be "distinctives" of View of the Hebrews, eschatological and otherwise, seemed less so in the early part of the nineteenth century, when these ideas flowed freely in published and unpublished forums.