The Book of Mormon recounts a history of the Americas from the arrival of a band of Israelites led by a man called Lehi in 600 BCE up until the destruction of Lehi's last righteous descendants in 384 CE. In the intervening years, Lehi's descendants split into two main groups: a smaller, largely faithful group called the Nephites and a larger, largely unfaithful group called the Lamanites. The Nephites, who are the protagonists of most of the narratives, prospered when they were faithful to God and suffered when they were not. The Lamanites eventually overcame and destroyed the Nephites, but not before the Nephite prophet Moroni buried the metal plates containing their histories to preserve them for a future age.

Because early Mormons understood the Lamanites to be the ancestors of the Indigenous people of North America, they saw the Book of Mormon as a miraculous revelation of an otherwise lost "Indian history." They invited prospective converts to read it in the context of other Israelite Indian stories, calling it "a history of the origin of the Indians," "a record of the aborigines of this continent," and "a full account of the aborigines of our country, [which] agreed with many of their traditions." Both historical and contemporary critics have made similar comparisons, speculating that texts by James Adair, Ethan Smith, or Josiah Priest were direct sources for some portions of the Book of Mormon. But the Book of Mormon's relationship to other Israelite Indian stories was always more complicated than any of these comparisons implied. The text differed from these other stories both in its narrative complexity—like the Bible, it has multiple narrators and voices—and in that it presented itself as scripture, not historical speculation. Of course, any, all, or none of these specific sources could have inspired Smith in a more general way to think that Israelites had once lived in North America. The evangelical reformers discussed in the previous chapter spent considerable effort sending missionaries, periodicals, and tracts to lower-class, rural White people such as Smith's family, so it is not impossible that they helped bring Israelite Indian stories to the Smith household.