Though not predominant, the lost tribes theory did appeal to religious thinkers eager to link Indians to the Bible. From the seventeenth century onward, both Christians and Jews had collected evidence that the Indians had Jewish origins. Jonathan Edwards Jr. noted the similarities between the Hebrew and Mohican languages. Such Indian practices as "anointing their heads, paying a price for their wives, observing the feast of harvest" were cited as Jewish parallels. Besides Edwards, John Eliot, Samuel Sewall, Roger Williams, William Penn, James Adair, and Ehas Boudinot expressed opinions or wrote treatises on the Israelite connection.

Did any of this speculation filter down to Joseph Smith? The evidence compiled by the Israelite school was summarized in an 1823 volume, View of the Hebrews, by Ethan Smith, a Congregational minister in Poultney, Vermont. Since Oliver Cowdery's family lived in Poultney, and Cowdery did not leave until after the book's publication, critics have speculated that View of the Hebrews might have fallen into Joseph Smith's hands and inspired the Book ofMormon. Both books speak of migrations from Palestine to America and of a great civilization now lost; both describe a division that pitted a civilized against a savage branch with the higher civilization falling to the lower; both books elicit sympathy for a chosen people fallen into decay. Even though Joseph Smith is not known to have seen View of the Hebrews until later in his life, the parallels seem strong enough for critics to argue that Ethan Smith provided the seeds for Joseph Smith's later composition.

But for readers of Ethan Smith, the Book of Mormon was a disappointment. It was not a treatise about the origins of the Indians, regardless of what early Mormons said. The Book of Mormon never used the word "Indian." The book had a different form and purpose than the earlier works on Indian origins. The assembling of anthropological evidence was the central endeavor of View of the Hebrews and the books that preceded it. Ethan Smith and his predecessors looked for signs of a deteriorating Jewish culture in Indian society, ticking off instances such as similarities in sacrifices and feasts. The Book of Mormon gave almost no attention to Old Testament parallels; its prophets taught pure Christianity. View of the Hebrews was an anthropological treatise, combining scripture and empirical evidence to propound a theory. The Book of Mormon was a narrative, not a treatise. Anyone looking for a scientific investigation of Indian origins in its pages would have found ancient American Christianity instead.

Early Mormons disregarded the differences in their book and the writings on Indian culture. They eagerly cited all of the scholarship about the original inhabitants of North and South America as proof of the book's accuracy. The editor of the Mormon newspaper Times and Seasons was thrilled by John L. Stephens's immensely popular Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan in 1841. In the Saints' eyes, all reports on the glories of ancient American civilization vindicated the Book of Mormon. Among the rest, they casually cited Ethan Smith's work to prove the validity of the Hebrew connection. But their Book ofMormon was another kind of book.

When other authors delved into Indian origins, they were explicit about recognizable Indian practices and the location of particular tribes. Solomon Spaulding's romance had characters traveling through a recognizable landscape from the east coast to the "Owaho" river formed by the confluence of two great rivers. There they met a people called "Kentucks" and another called "Delewans." A reader going through Spaulding's pages could readily locate Indian places on a modern map. Burial mounds in his manuscript reminded readers of modern remains. Readers easily oriented themselves in time and place on an Indian landscape.

The Book of Mormon deposited its people on some unknown shore—not even definitely identified as America—and had them live out their history in a remote place in a distant time, using names that had no connections to modern Indians. All modern readers had to go on was the reference to a "narrow neck of land." Lacking specific orientation points. Mormon scholars still debate the location of the Nephite nation. Once here, the Book of Mormon people are not given an Indian character. None of the trademark Indian items appear in the Book of Mormon's pages. In his parody of the Book of Mormon, Cole dressed his characters in blankets and moccasins. They traveled in bark canoes and suffered from smallpox. Spaulding's Indians lived in wigwams and raised corn, beans, and squash. The Book of Mormon contains none of the identifying words like squaw, papoose, wampum, peace pipes, tepees, braves, feathers, and no canoes, moccasins, or corn. Burial mounds, supposedly a stimulus for investigation of the Indians, receive only the slightest mention. Nephites and Lamanites fought with bows and arrows, but also with swords, cimeters, slings, and shields, more like classical warriors than Native Americans. The closest the book comes to an Indian identification is the description of Lamanites as bloodthirsty and bare-chested. Neglecting to scatter obvious clues through its pages, the Book of Mormon seems more focused on its own Christian message than on Indian anthropology. The book refuses to argue its own theory.