There were other elements to this complex tangle of Freemasonry and millenarianism in the New Israelite towns. In 1823 Ethan Smith, the Antimasonic Congregational minister in Poultney, published a text entitled View of the Hebrews, or the Tribes of Israel in America. As had Richard Brothers, the English prophet of the 1790s, Ethan Smith emphasized that the millennium and the restoration of the Kingdom of God depended on the return of the Jews to Jerusalem. In particular, the fulfillment of ancient prophecy required the return of the Ten Lost Tribes to Israel. On the basis of a report of a parchment book found in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (William Miller's birthplace), and stories of metal artifacts and plates recovered from Indian burial mounds in western New York and Ohio, Ethan Smith was convinced that the American Indian peoples were the Lost Tribes. The same general idea would stand at the center of Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon, and it seems clear that Oliver Cowdery was familiar with Ethan Smith's book when he joined Joseph Smith in translating the Book of Mormon in 1827.

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If the Book of Mormon eventually led to a promise of hermetic divinization, this was not its central, manifest theme. More obviously, the central themes of the book revolve around the depiction of the American Indians as transplanted Israelites. This idea had a long history in the millennial Protestant tradition. English millenarian Joseph Mede had posited in 1634 that the Indians were led to the New World by the devil as his chosen people; by 1650 Thomas Thorowgood was writing of them as the Lost Tribes, inspiring John Eliot's missionary work among the Natick Indians. In 1775 and 1816 the writings of James Adair and Elias Boudinot revived the thesis of Israelite origins, and Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, published in Poultney in 1823, attempted to confront the problem of the lack of recorded evidence, a flaw in the Israelite theory that Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon resolved.

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It is possible that Oliver Cowdery helped to print Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews. This text was printed on a press in Poultney, and Cowdery had had experience as a printer.