Editing Book of Mormon (section)

=== American Indian origins ===
{{see also | Mound Builders#Alternative explanations|View of the Hebrews}}
Contact with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas prompted intellectual and theological controversy among many Europeans and European Americans who wondered how biblical narratives of world history could account for hitherto unrecognized Indigenous societies.{{Sfn|Vogel|1986|pp=7, 37–38}} From the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth, numerous European and American writers proposed that ancient [[Jews]], perhaps through the Lost Ten Tribes, were the ancestors of Native Americans.{{Sfn|Vogel|1986|pp=39–43}} One of the first books to suggest that Native Americans descended from Jews was written by Jewish-Dutch rabbi and scholar [[Menasseh Ben Israel|Manasseh ben Israel]] in 1650.{{Sfn|Vogel|1986|pp=40–41}} Such curiosity and speculation about Indigenous origins persisted in the United States into the antebellum period when the Book of Mormon was published,{{Sfn|Vogel|1986|pp=48–49}} as archaeologist Stephen Williams explains that "relating the American Indians to the Lost Tribes of Israel was supported by many" at the time of the book's production and publication.{{sfn|Williams|1991|p=164}} Although the Book of Mormon did not explicitly identify Native Americans as descendants of the diasporic Israelites in its narrative, nineteenth-century readers consistently drew that conclusion and considered the book theological support for believing American Indians were of Israelite descent.{{Sfn|Howe|2007|p=317}}

European descended settlers took note of earthworks left behind by the [[Mound Builder]] cultures and had some difficulty believing that Native Americans, denigrated in racist colonial worldviews and whose numbers had been greatly reduced over the previous centuries, could have produced them. A common theory was that a more "civilized" and "advanced" people had built them, but were overrun and destroyed by a more savage, numerous group.{{Sfn|Vogel|1986|pp=61–65}} Some Book of Mormon content resembles this "mound-builder" genre pervasive in the nineteenth century.{{sfn|Kennedy|1994|pp=228–231}}<ref>{{cite journal |url=http://media.web.britannica.com/ebsco/pdf/770/5135770.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://media.web.britannica.com/ebsco/pdf/770/5135770.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live |last=Garlinghouse |first=Thomas |title=Revisiting the Mound Builder Controversy |work=History Today |date=September 2001 |volume=51 |number=9 |page=38 }}</ref>{{Sfn|Vogel|1986|p=65}} Historian Curtis Dahl wrote, "Undoubtedly the most famous and certainly the most influential of all Mound-Builder literature is the ''Book of Mormon'' (1830). Whether one wishes to accept it as divinely inspired or the work of Joseph Smith, it fits exactly into the tradition."<ref>{{cite journal |doi=10.2307/362525 |journal=[[The New England Quarterly]] |jstor=362525 |title=Mound-Builders, Mormons, and William Cullen Bryant |last1=Dahl |first1=Curtis |year=1961 |volume=34 |issue=2 |pages=178–190 |quote-page=187}}</ref> Historian Richard Bushman argues the Book of Mormon does not comfortably fit the Mound Builder genre because contemporaneous writings that speculated about Native origins "were explicit about recognizable Indian practices"{{Efn|For example, Abner Cole's parody of the Book of Mormon, ''The Book of Pukei'', described characters wearing moccasins.{{sfn|Bushman|2005|p=97}}}} whereas the "Book of Mormon deposited its people on some unknown shore—not even definitely identified as America—and had them live out their history" without including tropes that Euro-Americans stereotyped as Indigenous.{{sfn|Bushman|2005|p=97}}