ETHAN SMITH

Smith was a Congregational pastor in Hopkinton, New Hampshire; Poultney, Vermont; and Hanover, Massachusetts. According to David Persuitte, he was the source for Joseph Smith's statements in the Book of Mormon on the Ten Lost Tribes and Jews. In addition to Beatty, Adair and Bartram, Smith drew upon a variety of first hand reports, notably those of renowned geographer and Congregationalist leader Jedidiah Morse (1761-1826).

For Smith too the Christian eschaton ("millennial kingdom of Christ") was imminent. He thought that the (unidentified) "signs of the times" (e.g., Matthew 16:3) had been in place for some thirty years. Like his predecessors he identified the destruction of Antichrist ("the battle of that great day of God Almighty") with that of Rome. Like Boudinot ("This fall of the mystical Babylon [Rome] is to answer the same purpose to the Christian world, that the desolation of the Jewish state and the Temple did to the believing Jews, soon after our Savior's resurrection"), Smith spoke of Jerusalem's destruction forty years after Christ's ascension as prefiguring the end to Rome.

As to the Jews: The descendants of Judah and Benjamin crucified Christ and fell under the full execution of His wrath. Moses already told them that God would cut them off for their transgressions, "and the Messiah uttered against them, in consequence of their rejecting Him, a new edition of these fatal denunciations" (Matthew 24, Luke 19, 21, 23).36 At the end of history the Jews traceable to Judah and Benjamin would undergo conversion and return. In fact, Smith considered the process well underway. The Jews in Poland, for example, "seem to be convinced that some important change in their condition is preparing; and they seem ready to cooperate in the means of such a change." He cited the efforts of the American Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Jews (founded in 1816 as the American Society for Evangelizing Jews) and Joseph Wolff's mission in Palestine and "the remarkable conversion [there] of many of the Jews."

What of the Ten Lost Tribes? Drawing from Charlevoix, Beatty, Adair and Boudinot, as well as a variety of other sources such as Samuel Jarvis (1786-1851), Smith pointed to such similarities as the Long Island Indian belief in one supreme God, Creek refuge cities, Chipewyan tradition of a great deluge, Sioux belief in man's creation by God from the earth's dust and the reverence for one tribe, namely the Mohawks. These "savage" and "outcast" people (Isaiah 11:12) were now to be restored. Isaiah's voice crying in the wilderness to prepare the way of God (Isaiah 40:3) applied to them:

The voice, which restores Israel, is heard in the vast wilderness of America, a literal wilderness of thousands of miles, where the dry bones of the outcasts of Israel have for thousands of years been scattered. The voice crying in the wilderness has a special appropriation to these [Indian] Hebrews. As it had a kind of literal fulfillment in the preaching of John [the Baptist], for a short time in the wilderness of Judea; so it is to have a kind of literal fulfillment, upon a much greater scale, in the missions which shall recover the ten tribes from the vast wilderness of America.

The restoration-recovery involved self-awareness of the ancient Israelite legacy, conversion to Christ, and return. Like Crawford and Boudinot, Smith said that teachers were needed to explain their unconscious legacy—the early blessings, the ejection from their ancient Land. The Indians should be told that the end of time was nearing when they would return to their "God of their salvation"; that the "Great Spirit above the clouds" was about to call them "to come and receive His grace by Christ, the true star from Jacob, the Shiloh who has come (Genesis 49:10), to whom the people must be gathered." Christians would be delivering the Indians from "a mystical wilderness of spiritual wretchedness, of ignorance and moral death," and from the "literal wilderness" of America into the Land of Israel. He called upon fellow American Christians to commit themselves to the endeavor:

If our natives be indeed from the tribes of Israel, American Christians may well feel that one great object of their inheritance here [in America] is that they may have a primary agency in restoring those 'lost sheep of the house of Israel' [Matthew 10:6]. Those Hebrews first occupied the blessings of the covenant and the old and dark dispensation. Then the Christian gentiles came into possession of the blessings of this covenant, under its last, the Christian dispensation. Noah, more than four thousand years ago, in prophetic rhapsody, uttered the following prediction: 'God shall enlarge Japheth (ie., the gentiles); and He shall dwell in the tents of Shem' (or of the Hebrews) [Genesis 9:27]. But this event is only until the fulness of the gentiles be come in [Romans 11:25]; then shall the Hebrews again take their place as God's first born [Jeremiah 31]. Let us then be active in restoring their long lost blessing.

Smith emphasized that the restoration was literal. The prophetic "eye" rested "on a literal restoration of his long lost brethren" to Zion.

Upon their respective returns to the Land of Israel, the descendants of Judah and Benjamin and the Ten Lost Tribes would re-unify under Christ. Smith cited Ezekiel's "two sticks." One was inscribed for the Jews who returned from Babylon, another for the ten tribes of Israel who revolted in the days of Rehoboam and were separated off (Ezekiel 37).

These two sticks, miraculously, become one in the prophet's mind. And this miracle, God explains [in terms of] the two nations, the Jews and Israel, becoming permanently united in one nation, in the Land of their fathers, and remaining holy and happy thenceforward under the reign of Christ, their spiritual David.

Smith added that the converted Jews would be the most powerful force for converting the rest of the world (Zechariah 8:23), after the fall of Antichrist:

The converted Jews, taking a pre-eminent stand in the church of Christ, might be expected to burn with a holy zeal, to promote that cause of their Messiah, which they have so long trampled under foot. And beholding the millions, through the earth, dead in paganism, they would greatly desire their conversion, and make every arrangement to effect it.

Smith, like Eliot and Boudinot, believed that America had a special role in the eschaton. American Christians, as cited above, inherited the "great object" of helping to restore the Indians. Further, the land of America would itself become transformed:

As the wilderness of Judea in a small degree blossomed as a rose when John the Baptist performed his ministry in it [Mark 1:4]; so the wilderness [Isaiah 35:1] and solitary place of our vast continent containing the lost tribes of the house of Israel will, on a most enlarged scale, rejoice and blossom as the rose, when the long lost tribes shall be found there and shall be gathered into Zion.

For Smith, then, there was also a tripartate relationship: Christian kingdom, return-conversion of Judah and Benjamin; self-awareness-return-conversion of the Ten Lost Tribes. The crucifixion-conversion correlation was so intense for him that he expected the crucifiers to become the greatest missionaries in introducing the millennium. America loomed large in Smith's eschatology. It was God's appointed reservation for the Ten Lost Tribes in anticipation of the Christian kingdom; American Christians were especially responsible for conversion, and the land itself recalled the Holy Land of Isaiah and John the Baptist.