There is a simple common-sense explanation which states that Joseph Smith was a normal person living in an atmosphere of religious excitement that influenced his behavior as it had that of so many thousands of others and, through a unique concomitance of circumstances, influences, and pressures, led him from necromancy into revelation, from revelation to prophecy, and from prophecy to leadership of an important religious movement and to involvement in the bitter and fatal intergroup conflicts that his innovations and success had called forth. To the non-Mormon who does not accept the work as a divinely revealed scripture, such an explanation on the basis of the evidence at hand seems by far the most likely and safest.

The manifest theme of the book is the arrival and settlement of Hebrews on this continent before the Christian Era, a theme that serves the obvious purpose of explaining the origin of the American Indian, a subject upon which there had been much speculation. The presence of Indian mounds and palisades in western New York and Ohio had increased interest in the subject. Yet the explanation offered by the Book of Mormon was not new. It was the conjecture most widely entertained at the time, and it had been the opinion of many clergymen since Cotton Mather that Hebraic origin must explain the genesis of human existence on these shores. Many books had been written on the subject, and recently there had been published another, one quite possibly known by Joseph Smith. This work, written by Ethan Smith and entitled View of the Hebrews: or the Ten Tribes of lsrael in America, was published in 1823. It contained "all the items of three generations of specious scholarship and piecemeal observation on this subject. It also contained Caleb Atwater's description of Indian mounds in Ohio and one of Central American ruins by Von Humboldt. It was a source of genuine information as well as of erroneous inference on the subject of Indian origins.

To the popular notions of Hebraic genesis, the Book of Mormon added nothing new except the very important claim of presenting original written remains, and these on the basis of miraculous intervention. It is this aspect of the book rather than the novelty of its hypothesis that explains its appeal, limited though it was at first. Yet the manifest theme of Hebraic origins of the Indian had an important influence upon Mormon thinking and even upon Mormon destiny.