View of the Hebrews

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View of the Hebrews is a book written by Ethan Smith (1762-1849), which argues that native Americans were descended from the Hebrews. Numerous commentators on Mormon doctrine, from LDS Church Authority B. H. Roberts to Joseph Smith biographer Fawn M. Brodie, have discussed the possibility that View of the Hebrews may have provided source material for the Book of Mormon, a scripture of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which Mormons instead believe to have been translated from ancient golden plates by Joseph Smith, Jr.[1]

Contents

[edit] Biography of Ethan Smith

Ethan Smith, unrelated to Joseph Smith, was a New England Congregationalist clergyman. Born into a pious home, Smith abandoned religion after the early deaths of his parents. He served in the American Revolution and in 1780 was at West Point when Benedict Arnold's treason was exposed. After a prolonged inner struggle, he joined the Congregational Church in 1781 and shortly thereafter began training for the ministry, graduating from Dartmouth College in 1790, though finding "but little of the spirit of religion there."

After serving congregations in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts, Smith accepted an appointment as "City Missionary" in Boston and also served as a supply pastor for vacant pulpits. "He was a warm friend of what he accounted pure revivals of religion; though he was careful to distinguish the precious from the vile" in matters of religious experience. Smith enjoyed a "robust constitution and vigorous health" and continued to preach until within two weeks of his death. Smith and his wife, Bathsheba Sanford Smith, had ten children. At eighty, his sight "became very dim, and he was no longer able to read, though he never became totally blind. So familiar was he with the Bible and Watts, that it was his uniform custom to open the book in the pulpit, and give out the chapter and hymn, and seem to read them; and he very rarely made a mistake, to awaken a suspicion that he was repeating from memory."

Besides View of the Hebrews, Smith published A Dissertation on the Prophecies, (1809), A Key to the Figurative Language of the Prophecies (1814), A View of the Trinity, designed as an answer to Noah Webster's Bible News (1821), Memoirs of Mrs. Abigail Bailey, Four Lectures on the Subjects and Mode of Baptism, A Key to the Revelation (1833), and Prophetic Catechism to Lead to the Study of the Prophetic Scriptures (1839).[2]

Ethan Smith lived in the same small town as Oliver Cowdery, who later assisted Joseph Smith in translating the Book of Mormon, and Ethan Smith also pastored the Congregational church that Cowdery's family attended from 1821 to 1826 while he was writing View of the Hebrews.[3]

[edit] Thesis of View of the Hebrews

The first edition of Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews was published in 1823, and a second expanded edition appeared in 1825. Ethan Smith's theory, relatively common among both theologians and laymen of his day, was that Native Americans were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, who disappeared after being taken captive by the Assyrians in the 8th century BCE. Smith's speculation took flight from a verse in the Apocrypha, 2 Esdras 13: 14, which says that the Ten Tribes traveled to a far country, "where never mankind dwelt"—which Smith interpreted to mean America. During Smith's day, speculation about the Ten Lost Tribes was heightened both by a renewed interest in biblical prophecy and by the belief that the aboriginal peoples who had been swept aside by Europeans settlers could not have created the sophisticated mounds found in North America. Smith, on the contrary, attempted to rescue Indians from the contemporary mound builder myth by making native Americans "potential converts worthy of salvation."[4]"If our natives be indeed from the tribes of Israel," Smith wrote, "American Christians may well feel, that one great object of their inheritance here, is, that they may have a primary agency in restoring those 'lost sheep of the house of Israel.'"[5]

[edit] Parallels between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon

There are significant parallels between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon. B.H. Roberts (1857-1933), a prominent LDS scholar and apologist for the Book of Mormon, wrote "Book of Mormon Difficulties: A Study," later published as Studies of the Book of Mormon. [6] In a letter to President Heber J. Grant and other church officials, Roberts urged "all the brethren herein addressed becoming familiar with these Book of Mormon problems, and finding the answer for them, as it is a matter that will concern the faith of the Youth of the Church now as also in the future, as well as such casual inquirers as may come to us from the outside world."[7] Roberts list of parallels included:

  • extensive quotation from the prophecies of Isaiah in the Old Testament.
  • the Israelite origin of the American Indian
  • the future gathering of Israel and restoration of the Ten Lost Tribes
  • the peopling of the New World from the Old via a long journey northward which encountered "seas" of "many waters"
  • a religious motive for the migration
  • the division of the migrants into civilized and uncivilized groups with long wars between them and the eventual destruction of the civilized by the uncivilized
  • the assumption that all native peoples were descended from Israelites and their languages from Hebrew
  • the burial of a sacred book
  • the description of extensive military fortifications with military observatories or "watch towers" overlooking them
  • a change from monarchy to republican forms of government
  • the preaching of the gospel in ancient America.[8]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Grant H. Palmer, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 58; B. H. Roberts, Studies of the Book of Mormon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 28-29; 151-54. Roberts wrote, "It has been pointed out in these pages that there are many things in the former book that might well have suggested many major things in the other. Not a few things merely, one or two, or half dozen, but many; and it is this fact of many things of similarity and the cumulative force of them that makes them so serious a menace to Joseph Smith's story of the Book of Mormon's origin."(240)
  2. ^ William B. Sprague,Annals of the American Pulpit (New York: Robert Carter & Bros., 1866), II, 296-300.
  3. ^ Palmer, 59-60.
  4. ^ Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004), 123.
  5. ^ View of the Hebrews, 248.
  6. ^ Robert's study was a critical examination of the book’s claims and origins that, according to LDS scholars, was intended to "preempt criticisms that could be leveled at the Book of Mormon." Ashurst-McGee, Mark (2003). "A One-sided View of Mormon Origins". FARMS Review 15 (2): pp. 309-364. Retrieved on 2006-12-22. 
  7. ^ December 29, 1921 in Studies of the Book of Mormon, 47).
  8. ^ Grant H. Palmer, An Insider's View of Mormon Origins (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002), 60-64.

[edit] References

  • Smith, Ethan (2002). View of the Hebrews 1825. Colfax, Wisconsin: Hayriver Press. ISBN 1-930679-61-0. 
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