While it is beyond the scope of this essay to offer a comprehensive analysis of the theory in all of its forms, this essay’s first section examines its exposition in the late- colonial and post- Revolutionary eras to show how the idea of Hebraic Indians allowed some white Christians to position American colonialism and the emergence of the United States as crucial nodes on a sacred, millennialist timeline. I first show how James Adair’s foundational exposition of the theory, A History of the American Indians (1775), uses pseudo-ethnographic descriptions of indigenous populations to refute polygenist theories and assert a single human history. Adair’s work thus established a clear monogenist argument that positioned Amerindians as tribes lost not only in terms of territory but also in terms of memory. Having forgotten who they are, indigenous Americans need a sharp observer to see their customs for what they are and trace their past to where it began in the Bible. Turning from Adair to two works that draw heavily on his History—Elias Boudinot’s A Star in the West (1816) and Ethan Smith’s A View of the Hebrews (1825)—I show that these works use “evidence” of American Hebraism to argue for the United States’ special place in a coming Christian millennium. Though their writings focus on the ostensible particulars of various Amerindian cultures, Boudinot and Smith are in the main concerned with the future of the United States, a future they predict will be short-lived. Once the Hebraic Indian synchs the American past with biblical history, the stage is set for the millennium.

Though it is a close contemporary of Boudinot’s and Smith’s works, and it offers a story of Hebraic Indians, The Book of Mormon does not present the lost tribes of Israel as the ancestors of American peoples and is in fact explicit in its rejection of that theory. Unlike other expositions of the theory, which rely on biblical exegesis and cultural analyses for their claims, The Book of Mormon is a narrative history of America, providing an elaborate picture of ancient people spanning a thousand years. But even though it is explicitly invested in eschatology and articulates many millenarian themes, I would argue that The Book of Mormon continually disrupts its own chronology and, often through its revision of the Hebraic Indian theory, resists the collapsing of sacred and national histories into a uniform line.