Lost Tribes. One thing we should definitely expect is exactly what most people who haven't read it assume the Book of Mormon is. They assume that it's a book about the Ten Lost Tribes, because that's what Joseph Smith's culture would definitely have produced. It was in the air. Speculation about the Indians being descended from the lost tribes of Israel was common. Why wouldn't Joseph Smith have followed that line of speculation? It's hard to imagine why an 1820s American would come up with some ludicrous story about someone escaping from Judah in 600 B.C. It has nothing to do with anything that matters in American religious culture of the time, while the Ten Lost Tribes were an obsessive topic at the time. Yet it isn't a book about the Ten Lost Tribes. And here's the kicker. If Joseph Smith had been deliberately flouting expectations, he would have made a point within the text about how this is not a story of the lost tribes. Yet, contrary to all expectations, the lost tribes are barely hinted at; they have almost nothing to do with the story, negatively or positively.

Women. Another thing we should definitely expect in an 1820s book is a love interest. This is no joke. Biography and history always focused on love interests in that era. Even the Bible has plenty of love interest stories—Ruth and Boaz, Joseph and Mary, Moses and Miriam, Abram and Sarai, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, David and Bathsheba, Solomon and Sheba—in Joseph Smith's era, all these stories were interpreted with powerful emphasis on romantic love. Women occupied a very important role in the stories being told in America in the 1820s. No contemporary feminist would approve of the role women played—but they were there, and they mattered. All heroic deeds were done for women, to obtain the love of a good woman. We have the troubadours to thank for that. The romantic tradition was very much alive in Joseph Smith's time.

Unfortunately women are virtually absent from the Book of Mormon. When they do manage to show up, they are rarely named. There are only three women who are actually of the culture of the Book of Mormon who are given names. One is Sariah, the mother of Nephi. Another is a harlot named Isabel, and the third is a servant woman named Abish.

None of the queens who show up in the story are mentioned by name. None of these writers ever mentions his own wife, and when women do show up in a specific role they're still almost never named. Nephi did not even bother to mention the name of the woman who saved his life by pleading for him in the desert. (A lot of people leap to the conclusion that this must have been the woman who ended up marrying Nephi. My own feeling is that Laman would hardly have listened to the pleading of Nephi's wife-to-be. It seems far more likely to me that the woman who pleaded for him was Laman's intended. The very fact that Nephi didn't name her supports this, I think, because, while he had to include this woman in his story, he couldn't very well point out that it was the woman who ended up marrying Laman. Laman is the king of the bad guys when Nephi is writing his account, and his wife is presumably queen. Nephi didn't spend much time in his account giving credit to his enemies for their virtuous actions. Of course, none of this is proof—but it's at least an intriguing possibility.)

The way women are treated in the Book of Mormon is not even remotely the way women were regarded and treated in the 1820s in the United States. If you doubt that, you have only to look at the way that Mormon women were treated in the history written by B. H. Roberts, or the Documentary History, which is more a product of that time.

It is telling, perhaps, that the only Book of Mormon culture in which mothers play an important role is not the culture of the writers of the book—not Nephite culture. Rather when two thousand young soldiers give credit to their mothers for having taught them courage and righteousness, they are products of Lamanite culture. And, again, it is within Lamanite culture where the queen of the Lamanites plays an important role in the conversion of her people, and where a servant named Abish saves the lives of the Lamanite king and queen who lie in a trance, overwhelmed by the Spirit. Remove these Lamanite cultural expressions from the story, and you find the Book of Mormon quite startling in its omission of women from the events of Nephite history. This is quite foreign to attitudes in Joseph Smith's culture. And while the Book of Mormon attitude toward women is perfectly acceptable in many other cultures in world history, they are not cultures the Prophet would have known of.

Awareness of the Audience. But the most telling confessions are little, tiny, unnoticeable choices, because that's where even the most brilliant fakers would give themselves away. He will make his invented culture different from the culture he lives in—but it will only be different where he has thought of it. The Book of Mormon should be an American story only where the author of the hoax thought of making the culture different. Every element of More's Utopia and Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe is presented in light of English culture of the author's time. Wherever the foreign land has not been made deliberately different from England, it is the same; and where it is different, the difference is clearly pointed out and commented upon. Of course, since these works are written from the point of view of a character in the story who is a contemporary Englishman, the narrative should point up the differences. But there should be far more differences in the first place; it is absurd how English these foreign lands turn out to be.

The author of an invented culture is going to be proud of his creation. It is almost impossible not to flaunt one's most fascinating ideas, to make them important plot points so that the audience can't possibly miss them. Unfortunately, if the Book of Mormon is a hoax, the author is astonishingly humble. The very cleverest cultural differences are not pointed up; on the contrary, they are often concealed so that most readers are completely unaware of them, and even cite them as examples of similarities to 1820s American culture.

Even the humblest and most self-effacing of authors, however, are incapable of completely forgetting the contemporary audience. Even when the narrator is supposedly a member of the strange culture, the author will still throw in those little explanations that will be necessary for a contemporary audience to understand the culture which he's presenting. Since the author has invented the strange culture, he is keenly aware of all of the differences, all the things that will be hard for his readers to understand. He will make sure that the cultural context is explained. He may be very clever about it, but the explanation will be there.

But if it's a genuine document, those differences will be almost invisible, because the writer won't think that it could possibly be any other way and, therefore, it won't occur to him that it needs any explanation. I Love Lucy episodes never stopped to explain, "By the way, the husband is the head of the home and has the authority to tell his wife what to do, just as if she were a child." They assume that the audience will know that. They assume that the audience doesn't need a defense of Ricky's spanking Lucy. "By the way, this isn't wife abuse." The need for such an explanation doesn't occur to them.

However, the Book of Mormon is a complicated document. Mormon is abridging documents that come from many generations before him. Just as there are cultural differences between 1950 and 1990, there will be times when Mormon, writing in the later fourth century, is aware of cultural changes since the time of Alma, for instance, four centuries before. So there will be times when he explains culture. However, even though he has seen our time in vision, he has not lived in it, and by and large he will explain those cultural differences, not to us, but rather in terms that would clarify them to people of his own time. And while Mormon will probably explain things that seem strange to him from the earlier documents that he's abridging, it won't occur to him to explain things that seem still perfectly normal to him.

Judges. So—does the author of the Book of Mormon explain things that an American audience of the 1820s would need to have explained, and in terms they would understand? Hardly. Let's look at just some of the most obvious things, some of the places where people think Joseph Smith blew it. For example, when Mosiah gives up his throne, the reign of the judges begins, and the judges are chosen "by the voice of the people." This is automatically taken by the critics of the Book of Mormon as proof that Joseph Smith, living in a democracy, had to show American democracy as the ideal government.

Think again. The resemblance between the reign of the judges and American democracy are superficial at best. Mormon, living in a time when judges apparently do not rule, explains what his culture would need to have explained—but does not comment at all upon the very significant ways that the judges differ from American democracy. The judges may be in some sense chosen by the will of the people, but look at how it actually works. In Joseph Smith's time there was much talk about the constitutional division of the executive, legislative, and judicial powers. But in the Book of Mormon, the judge not only judges people, but also enforces the law and directs the gathering of taxes and supplies and sending them in support of the armies. Not your normal, traditional role. He enforces traditional law, but when new laws are needed, the judge makes them! Where in American life of his time would Joseph Smith have seen this?

How are these judges selected? We hear of almost no contested elections. On the contrary, judges seem to nominate their successors. With few exceptions, the judge serves until death, and is usually succeeded by a son or brother, or by a member of a family that has previously held the judgeship. Now, except for the Adamses, there were no dynasties in Joseph Smith's America.

The judges actually function as elected kings. The old pattern of government still endured, they just had a different method of choosing the guy in charge. Mormon pointed out the difference, which meant he stressed the election of the judges by the voice of the people, never questioning that authority should stay in only a few aristocratic families and that judges should have monarchical powers. Far from being a mistake in the Book of Mormon, this is one of the places where the Book of Mormon makes it clear that it does not come from 1820s American culture. Even the best of hoaxers would have made the judges far more American.

Lineage. Furthermore, when we do find social classes in the Book of Mormon, political divisions, they seem to reflect alien to anything Joseph Smith was familiar with. To Joseph Smith, social classes were based entirely on money, which was displayed in the form of property. Where money is the basis of social distinction in the Book of Mormon, it is never associated with land, but rather with fine clothing. This is entirely consistent with Meso-America, but hardly a pattern Joseph Smith would have known.

When social conflict comes in the Book of Mormon, it seems to follow lineage rather than economic distinctions. A common pattern in the Caribbean basin was for an invading tribe to establish themselves as a permanent ruling class over the indigenous tribe, as the Taino of Haiti did. This seems to be the hidden pattern within the Book of Mormon culture. The Nephites seem to have been a ruling class superimposed on the underlying Mulekite population of Zarahemla, and as their influence spread, they continued this pattern of bringing indigenous people under the rule of a Nephite aristocracy. The Zoramites seem to have done the same, so that the division between the Zoramites and the poor is very clearly drawn. The poor are ruled by the Zoramites, but they are not Zoramites themselves.

In Ammonihah, Amulek asserts that he is a descendant of Nephi. This seems to be important, though it would hardly be so if everyone was descended from Nephi. But perhaps the distinction is clearest in the struggle between Kingmen and Freemen. This is thought by many of Joseph Smith's critics to be based on the American Revolution, but if anything it is the opposite—an effort on the part of an old aristocracy to reassert its primacy over the new judges. The America that Joseph Smith knew had no hereditary class that large numbers of people thought had the right to rule. Even in England, a culture the Prophet was probably marginally familiar with, no group of nobles could possibly have assembled a popular army that would seek to bring back kingly rather than parliamentary rule. But Zarahemla had a clan, a lineage, that could command enormous popular support—the old ruling family of the Mulekites. The Nephite kings had abandoned their right to rule, and had turned over the government to elected judges. But the indigenous people of Zarahemla would remember that they had once had kings of their own, before these strangers came from the land of Nephi. And they knew who the king should be. So even though the Book of Mormon calls it a war between Kingmen and Freemen—which is how it would certainly appear to those on the side of the Freemen, as the writers of the Book of Mormon accounts certainly were—it might have seemed to the Kingmen themselves to be a struggle between the ancient native tradition and the ruling class, which had surrendered its legitimacy by giving up the throne. After all, the Nephite kings had only ruled for three generations in Zarahemla.