Joseph Smith, Ethan Smith, and View of the Hebrews

[Zosimus]

My youtube algorithm must have seen me posting about Ethan Smith in the Secular Theory because this surfaced in my feed this morning:

Did He Plagiarize It? Joseph Smith, Ethan Smith, and View of the Hebrews

I've been re-reading all of Ethan Smith's works the past few months, and am convinced we've missed a lot of material there. Just a couple things:

Quote

Stephen Smoot: "Again the biggest one is that Native Americans have like Israelite ancestry okay even though in the Book of Mormon they're not the lost 10 tribes" 

Neal Rappleye: "You get into the details on that one and like I said it doesn't really fit with view of the Hebrews or the broader Indian Hebraic theory in general. No one to my knowledge besides the Book of Mormon was arguing that like just a single little group of Josephites left right before the Babylonian destruction"

It's hard to imagine that 100 years after BH Roberts introduced "View of the Hebrews" into the discussion, we are still completely missing the most interesting bits in the book.

In the appendix of the 1825 edition, Ethan Smith discusses a group of Israelites/Jews that cross the sea with manuscripts that pre-date the Babylonian captivity. He mentions that their skin became "black" and he says this happened for the same reasons (climate and habits of living) that gave the American natives a skin that was darker than their ancestors. Ethan Smith in View of the Hebrews directly compares the black Jews in India to the American Indians, which he considered to be lost tribes.

Ethan Smith then asks whether these Israelites are a remnant of the lost tribes or not. He concludes that they are not lost tribes because:

1. They called themselves Jews, not Israel.
2. They had books (including the Old Testament) that date to just before the Babylonian captivity.

Also, as pointed out in the video, Ethan Smith's most popular book was not View of the Hebrews, it was his 1809 work "A Dissertation on the Prophecies". This IMO is far more interesting for anyone looking for overlap between the Book of Mormon and contemporary sources. 

There's a lot in the video worth discussing, but i'll start with the above

[the narrator]

Focusing on supposed plagiarism and details completely misses the biggest point--which is that even if Joseph himself never touched one of Ethan Smith's books, what they show is that the broader themes of the BofM concerning the origins of Native Americans were widely held and speculated on at the time. Ethan Smith wasn't coming up with these things himself.

Edited March 9 by the narrator

[Zosimus]

8 hours ago, the narrator said:

Focusing on supposed plagiarism and details completely misses the biggest point--which is that even if Joseph himself never touched one of Ethan Smith's books, what they show is that the broader themes of the BofM concerning the origins of Native Americans were widely held and speculated on at the time. Ethan Smith wasn't coming up with these things himself.

Couldn't agree more. Ethan Smith identifies his sources, and they all fit within a very public effort to counter the criticisms of Enlightenment-era writers that were an influence on Joseph Smith Sr, specifically Paine and Voltaire.

Ethan Smith was heavily influenced by the writings of G.S. Faber, his "A Dissertation on the Prophecies" (1811) was a knock-off of Faber's earlier "A Dissertation on the Prophecies" (1808). From the Ethan Smith's book:

"I HAVE believed the signs of the times to be very interesting and have wished that some able writer might succeed in opening and presenting, in a judicious and connected manner, the sacred Prophecies which are receiving their fulfilment. Mr. Faber , I think , has succeeded better in this, than any other writer on the subject."

He then proceeds to pretty much copy/paste several themes and arguments from Faber's text, with over 62 citations, including the material I mentioned above from View of the Hebrews.

Faber is a name I've never heard mentioned in the context of Mormon studies, so I've been going through his two most popular works:

• The origin of pagan idolatry ascertained from historical testimony and circumstantial evidence
• A Dissertation on the Mysteries of the Cabiri: or the Great Gods of Phenicia, Samothrace, Egypt, Troas, Greece, Italy, and Crete

Faber's "arkite" system is directly injected into the moundbuilder discussion through James McCulloh, Caleb Atwater and Ethan Smith. The Book of Mormon emerges from those broader themes. 

[Zosimus]

Granted all this is a new thread that requires context that hasn't yet been fleshed out in Mormon studies. but it feels relevant to me so i'll drop notes here as I research

I start with an article in Times and Seasons, 15 October 1842:

MOUNT ARARAT, AND THE EARLY ABODE OF NOAH AND HIS DESCENDANTS

"In the opinion of the most learned among the moderns, Mount Ararat, where the ark of Noah rested, after the deluge, was in Armenia, or Thibet, and between 90o and 100o E. long. and between 30o and 35o north lat. north of Hindostan and Persia, west of the river Indus and of central Asia, and east of Mesopotamia and of the Caspian Sea."

In the early 19th century there was a very small subset of Biblical apologetics that placed Ararat west of the Indus and east of the Caspian. If we use Feroe Islands as 0° longitude, the coordinates for Ararat in T&S would be:

The T&S editorial places Ararat in the region of the Hindu Kush. This is a very clear fingerprint indicating the sources that the editors of T&S were using. Tracing the sources of this editorial, the influence of Sir William Jones, Francis Wilford and the Biblical mythographers Jacob Bryant and G.S. Faber becomes evident

This material was circulating around America in the 1820s through the works of James McCulloh, Caleb Atwater, Josiah Priest and Ethan Smith to explain the origins of the moundbuilders

[the narrator]

On 3/9/2026 at 8:31 PM, Zosimus said:

Couldn't agree more. Ethan Smith identifies his sources . .. 

As an 18 yr old pre-missionary in '98, I was a naive apologist on the internet (ZLMB being one place) and arguing that Ethan Smith was actually evidence for the historicity of the BofM.

[Zosimus]

On 3/13/2026 at 1:05 AM, the narrator said:

As an 18 yr old pre-missionary in '98, I was a naive apologist on the internet (ZLMB being one place) and arguing that Ethan Smith was actually evidence for the historicity of the BofM.

IMO View of the Hebrews does provide at least some evidence for the historicity of the broad underlying narrative of the BoM, just not in the Americas.

The one person in America that was attempting a synthesis of hundreds of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, German, French etc. texts to include America in the Biblical genealogy was Charles Anthon. In 1827, Anthon was working on a school textbook laying out all the evidence for a diffusion of civilization from the sons of Noah to the Americas. He was in the middle of this project when Harris turned up with the gold plate characters

The Lost Key to an American Revelation: Reconstructing Charles Anthon’s Phantom Textbook

[the narrator]

On 3/15/2026 at 1:41 AM, Zosimus said:

The one person in America that was attempting a synthesis of hundreds of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, German, French etc. texts to include America in the Biblical genealogy was Charles Anthon. In 1827, Anthon was working on a school textbook laying out all the evidence for a diffusion of civilization from the sons of Noah to the Americas.

Didn't know he was a proto-Nibley

[The Nehor]

On 3/15/2026 at 2:41 AM, Zosimus said:

IMO View of the Hebrews does provide at least some evidence for the historicity of the broad underlying narrative of the BoM, just not in the Americas.

The one person in America that was attempting a synthesis of hundreds of Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, German, French etc. texts to include America in the Biblical genealogy was Charles Anthon. In 1827, Anthon was working on a school textbook laying out all the evidence for a diffusion of civilization from the sons of Noah to the Americas. He was in the middle of this project when Harris turned up with the gold plate characters

The Lost Key to an American Revelation: Reconstructing Charles Anthon’s Phantom Textbook

I mean the obvious reason it was never finished is that the evidence to support it didn’t work out.

[Zosimus]

53 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

I mean the obvious reason it was never finished is that the evidence to support it didn’t work out.

That was my first thought, but

1. Anthon was still publicly discussing his theory that American Indians came from the same source population as the Egyptians and India Indians as late as 1836 in his letters supporting the United States Exploring Expedition to the South Seas.
    
2. Anthon continued to embed the theories of Ritter, Creuzer and Gorres in his later editions of A Classical Dictionary, greatly expanding on his articles about Egyptus, Pelsagians and Pyramids to include his speculations like the Mexican Votan being a grandson of Noah who helped build the Tower of Babel and who was related somehow to Woden and Buddha, an idea that passed from Sir William Jones through Ritter to Humboldt, who was a close associate of Ritter. Anthon discusses all this in his 1842 edition, so he was still convinced there was a connection between the religions of the east and west at least 15 years after announcing his plans for the textbook.
    
3. In the preface of his 1842 Classical Dictionary, Anthon ramps up his commitments to the German Mystics Creuzer, Ritter and Guigniaut: "The subject of Mythology has supplied, next to that of Ancient Geography, the largest number of articles to the present work. In the treatment of these, it has been the chief aim of the author to lay before the student the most important speculations of the two great schools (the Mystic and anti-Mystic) which now divide the learned of Europe. At the head of the former stands Creuzer, whose elaborate work (Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker) has reappeared under so attractive a form through the taste and learning of Guigniaut."

The entire battle between the Creuzer Mystics and the Lobeck anti-Mystics was over the origins of Western civilization. The mystics placed the source in the Hindu Kush area east of the Caspian Sea and west of the Indus, and the anti-Mystics rejected this in favor of Greece. Anthon says of the division "It has been the aim of the author to give a fair and impartial view of both systems, although he cannot doubt but that the former will appear to the student by far the more attractive one of the two." 

Anthon was on Creuzer's side, that Western civilization began in the highlands of Bactria, Hindoostan and Little Tibet,   

As I mention above, Joseph Smith in 1842 (same year Anthon publishes his updated dictionary to include hundreds of citations of Creuzer and Ritter) lines up almost precisely with the diffusionist theories of the Mystics.

"In the opinion of the most learned among the moderns, Mount Ararat, where the ark of Noah rested, after the deluge, was in Armenia, or Thibet, and between 90o and 100o E. long. and between 30o and 35o north lat. north of Hindostan and Persia, west of the river Indus and of central Asia, and east of Mesopotamia and of the Caspian Sea." - Times and Seasons, 15 October 1842

[The Nehor]

Gotta love the embedded idea that “civilization” had to come from somewhere and isn’t just something humans do. And of course “western civilization” as something special and unique was at the core of scientific racism.

[Zosimus]

43 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

Gotta love the embedded idea that “civilization” had to come from somewhere and isn’t just something humans do. And of course “western civilization” as something special and unique was at the core of scientific racism.

Anthon was there front and center for the early days of Aryan nationalism, only back then it was called Indo-Germanic. All the stuff Anthon was wrapping up for American students was eventually co-opted by German nationalists as evidence of a superior Hamitic/Japhetic root race that out-civilized the Semites. 

From the Ark to the Aryans: A Dangerous Revelation

[The Nehor]

2 hours ago, Zosimus said:

Anthon was there front and center for the early days of Aryan nationalism, only back then it was called Indo-Germanic. All the stuff Anthon was wrapping up for American students was eventually co-opted by German nationalists as evidence of a superior Hamitic/Japhetic root race that out-civilized the Semites. 

From the Ark to the Aryans: A Dangerous Revelation

Yep.