View of The Hebrews - Comparison With Book of Mormon

Comparison With Book of Mormon

Numerous scholars have identified the significant parallels between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon. In 1922 B.H. Roberts (1857–1933), a prominent LDS apologist and historian, was asked by the LDS Apostle James E. Talmage to answer a non-believer's five critical questions. He produced a confidential report that summarized eighteen points of similarity between the two works.

In a letter to LDS Church 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."

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 "lost book" with "yellow leaves;"
• the description of extensive military fortifications with military observatories or "watch towers" overlooking them;
• a change from monarchy to republican forms of government; and
• the preaching of the gospel in ancient America.

Roberts continued to affirm his faith in the divine origins of the Book of Mormon until his death in 1933. As Terryl Givens has written, "a lively debate has emerged over whether his personal conviction really remained intact in the aftermath of his academic investigations."

Fawn Brodie, the first important historian to write a non-hagiographic biography of Joseph Smith, believed that Joseph Smith's theory of the Hebraic origin of the American Indians came "chiefly" from View of the Hebrews. "It may never be proved that Joseph saw View of the Hebrews before writing the Book of Mormon," wrote Brodie in 1945, "but the striking parallelisms between the two books hardly leave a case for mere coincidence."

A number of Mormon apologists have argued that the parallels between the works are weak, over-emphasized, or non-existent.