An account of American origins could become an argument about what Americans should do next. Ethan Smith (1762–1849), a Vermont minister, believed Indigenous peoples descended from the lost tribes of Israel. In View of the Hebrews (1823), that identity connected their past to a promised future gathering. Recognizing them as Israel would change the religious significance of their circumstances and the duties Christians believed they owed them.
Smith assembled reports of customs and antiquities as signs of the ancestry he proposed. Practices that appeared unfamiliar could be interpreted through the biblical past, while resemblances to Hebrew life became evidence of survival through long separation. The argument required readers to accept more than a collection of parallels. They had to believe those parallels established the identity on which the prophetic conclusion depended.
His debt to George Stanley Faber (1773–1854) is explicit in his discussion of restoration. That acknowledgment lets us follow a particular part of the reasoning from British religious scholarship into an American book. Smith used inherited arguments to address people and events much nearer to him. The history of ancient dispersal had become a question about the fulfilment of prophecy in the present.
The book also helps establish the subjects being discussed in the years before the Book of Mormon. Lost peoples, biblical ancestry, and religious restoration were already available to American readers in this and other forms. That setting deserves close attention without being made to prove a particular act of borrowing. Publication of a book shows what an audience could encounter; evidence that an individual read and used it is a further question. For Smith’s readers in the 1820s, the proposed identity carried an immediate expectation. The people he called Israel were still awaiting the restoration he believed Scripture promised them.