The reverend Ethan Smith of Poultney, Vermont, was another vocal and important advocate of literal restoration and Indian-Hebraic origins. Smith’s View of the Hebrews (1823), a long dissertation on the Israelite origin of the Indians and its millenarian significance, became popular in its own right; it was further popularized by Josiah Priest, an uneducated harness maker and successful writer, who announced in the fifth edition of his American Antiquities and Discoveries in the West (1833), a book that reproduced extensive verbatim portions of A View of the Hebrews, that he had sold twenty-two thousand copies in thirty months, a staggering number for the early republic. Smith’s work drew heavily on the writings of Adair and Boudinot, two authors he deemed "great and good men most artlessly uniting in the leading facts [first] stated by Mr. Adair.” The pages of A View of the Hebrews abound with the now familiar ideas and patterns found in Boudinot’s work, from deep perplexity about the disappearance of the tribes of Israel, to the belief that “the Jews are to be restored to Palestine . . . and that the ten tribes of Israel will there be united with them.” Ethan Smith even made use of counterfactual logic reminiscent of Boudinot’s, and asked his readers to “suppose you find” the “striking” similarities between Indians and Hebrews that he enumerated at length over hundreds of pages. The deep correspondences and similarities between Israelites and “such a people [as Indians], without books or letters, but wholly in a savage state, in a region of the world lately discovered,” seemed astonishing. Could you, Smith asked, “hesitate to say you had found the ten tribes of Israel?” Smith could not. He declared his certainty even more forcefully than Boudinot, asserting that the Indians’ Hebrew lineage is “more than mere supposition”; Smith firmly believed he had “ascertained [those connections] as facts, with substantial evidence.”

. . .

As popular as Ethan Smith’s A View of the Hebrews may have been in the years after its publication in 1823, it is today obscure and all but forgotten. This cannot be said about another text involving biblical Hebrews in America, published not far from Poultney, seven years after Ethan Smith’s. In 1830, after receiving a series of revelations as a teenager, Joseph Smith, Jr., of Palmyra, New York, published the Book of Mormon, a scriptural text that recorded the history of an ancient Israelite race that migrated to America in the sixth century B.C. As we have seen in the preceding chapter, historians within and without Mormondom have long attempted to contextualize Joseph Smith and his writing, and consequently, as a Mormon historian points out, scholars have been increasingly aware of the influence of Joseph Smith’s cultural environment on the Book of Mormon. By continuing to contextualize the Book of Mormon in light of the public discussion about the Hebraic origins of the American Indians, we may better understand the potency and dynamism of the culture of Hebraism with respect to the emergence (and early appeal) of the Mormon Bible.

The Book of Mormon joined and captured contemporary American biblicism and its predilection for the Old Testament. Joseph Smith, who was even “more enamored of the Hebrew Bible than most of his Protestant contemporaries,” was a product of and mirrored the keen religiosity and biblicism of the Second Great Awakening.