This view makes the Book of Mormon story much clearer and seems to fit the cultural patterns in the book. On the other hand, the American Revolution provides no useful analogy and doesn't fit the facts in the book. Yet if the Book of Mormon were a hoax, this alien social pattern would surely have been pointed out and clarified so that the 1820s American reader couldn't possibly miss it. Instead, it is simply taken for granted by the author, so that it can easily be overlooked by the reader who isn't looking for alien social patterns. Neither Mormon nor the writers whose works he abridged would even think to explain the relationships among tribes and lineages, because to them those things were obvious. For an analogy, you might look at the mysteries of Tony Hillerman. His stories are set on the Navaho reservation of Arizona and New Mexico, yet he feels no need to stop and explain to the American reader that the Navahos were once an independent nation, which was confined to a reservation by the U.S. government. He certainly does not go through the whole history of the relationship between native Americans and the European invaders. Likewise, how many essays and articles are written about poverty in American cities today without bothering to go through the whole history of slavery, emancipation, segregation, the African-American migration to the cities of the North, and the struggle for civil rights?

In a longer history of America, of course, these themes would be dealt with, precisely because they have changed over time. In fact, because of the rapidity of change in our culture, we have a tendency to explain a lot more than historians from earlier eras. Even so, how many histories of important events in American history do you think could be written without a single mention of drive-in movies, microwave ovens, and handheld calculators? We ignore what we take for granted, just as the writers of the Book of Mormon did. When, after the birth of Christ, the Nephite society broke down completely, people immediately lapsed into tribal organizations—Nephites, Jacobites, Josephites, and so on. But in all the years since the Nephites first organized themselves as a nation, we have had not a single mention of those tribes other than the ruling Nephites themselves. We might have thought that all the people were Nephites. And yet those tribal organizations persisted throughout the entire six hundred years of Nephite society and were available to provide a skeletal social organization when the rule of law broke down. So the hoaxer who was writing the Book of Mormon was so brilliant that he not only maintained this shadow organization of society until it was needed in the plot just before King Jacob, but also deliberately did not mention it, in keeping with the way history would be written by someone within that culture.

Speculation on Zarahemla. Let me offer an aside on the matter of Zarahemla and the Mulekites. Much has been made of the statement by King Zarahemla that his people were descended from the youngest son of King Zedekiah. Extraordinary and completely unconvincing efforts have been made to find such a son, overlooked by the Babylonian captors of Jerusalem; just as much effort has been devoted to explaining how a good Jaredite name like Mulek could show up in the family of an Israelite king. But is this really necessary?

In Meso-American culture, every ruling class had to assert an ancient ancestor who was a god or, at the very least, a king in an admired culture. Whoever ruled in the Valley of Mexico always had to claim to be descended from or heirs of the Toltecs. Rival Mayan cities would play at ancestral one-upmanship. Imagine, now, the vigorous and dangerous Nephites, coming down the valley of the Sidon River from the highlands of Guatemala. King Zarahemla is negotiating with King Mosiah. Mosiah tells him of his ancestry, of course, and the story of how God led Lehi and Nephi out of Jerusalem at the time when Zedekiah was king of Israel.

To Mosiah, what he is doing is bearing his testimony and asserting the divine guidance that he receives as the legitimate king of a chosen people. To Zarahemla, what he is doing is claiming that his lineage gives him the right to rule over the people of Zarahemla and displace him from the kingship. So what does Zarahemla do? Well, Mosiah admits that his ancestors were not kings in Israel. So Zarahemla picks his most noble ancestor, Mulek, and then declares him to be the son of that last king of Israel. Thus if anybody has the right to rule over anybody, it's Zarahemla who has the right to rule over Mosiah and his people. But Mosiah kindly points out that if Zarahemla and his people are descended from Israelites, they certainly seem to have forgotten the language and writing, and therefore have obviously degenerated from the high culture of Israel. The Nephites, on the other hand, have preserved a writing system that no one else uses, and which Zarahemla can't read. They have a history accounting for every year since they arrived in America, which Zarahemla of course cannot produce.

In the end, whatever negotiation there was ended up with Zarahemla bowing out of the kingship and his people becoming subject to rule by the Nephites. But the story of Mulek served a very useful purpose even so—it allowed the people to merge, not with the hostility of conquerors over the conquered, though in fact that is what the relationship fundamentally was, but rather with the idea of brotherhood. They were all Israelites. Thus no one had any reason to question the Mulek story, because, while it failed in its original purpose, to allow Zarahemla to prevail over Mosiah, it still served the valuable function of uniting the newly combined nation as a single tribe. It wasn't completely successful, of course, or there wouldn't have been a later revolt of Kingmen against Nephite Freemen, but considering that the people of Zarahemla outnumbered the people of Mosiah by quite a bit, the Mulek story may well have contributed to the ultimate victory of the judges in that struggle.

If this speculation is true, it does not imply that the Book of Mormon is somehow false. No one in the Book of Mormon ever claims that the story of Mulek came to anybody by inspiration. The source is never more than Zarahemla's assertion during his negotiations with Mosiah. That Mormon and other writers believed the story does not prove it true or false, it simply proves that it was part of the Nephite culture. And if my speculation is right, and Mulek was no more a son of Zedekiah than I am, we are spared the confusion of trying to reconcile this account with the utter lack of convincing evidence that Zedekiah had a boy named Mulek who escaped the Babylonians without generating a vast amount of Jewish tradition looking for the return of the lost son of the last king of Judah. We don't have to account for a migration to America led by the Lord but without the same kind of preparation and commandments given to Lehi and Nephi. We don't have to account for the fact that we think of America as being the inheritance of Manasseh and Ephraim, while in fact two thirds of the Nephites would have been descended from Judah—which to my mind, at least, would make hash of the literality of the application of the parable of the stick of Joseph and the stick of Judah to the Book of Mormon and the Bible.

But this is only speculation, and if I'm wrong, and there really was a Mulek led to America by the Lord, I'm not going to lose my testimony about it! I just think it's something to think about, a possibility to consider.

Instant Cities. Joseph Smith lived in a place where new settlements had sprung up in the wilderness, and he was quite familiar with what it took. Americans of his time and place new perfectly well the difference between a settlement, a village, a town, and a city. They knew from hard experience exactly what it took to get from wilderness to city—how many years, how many settlers.

So why is it that when Captain Moroni is trying to secure the Nephite borders, he founds cities left and right? Cities that are instantly fortified and populated, seemingly without any kind of migration of settlers from the heartland of the Nephites? Joseph Smith knew the word fort, and new perfectly well that a military commander trying to secure hostile country would not found cities—he would build forts and leave garrisons in them.

But in Meso-American culture, particularly in the jungles where the Mayans built their cities, there were always small villages and settlements in the wilderness, families on their own, and an ambitious king looking to expand could very easily move into a new territory, gather together a lot of isolated and vulnerable settlers, and unite them into a city. No settlers were needed from outside. The people were already there. They simply gathered together to create public works—temples, in Mayan times, but in Moroni's case, fortifications for defense. The cities didn't require large garrisons, since the newly gathered people became citizen soldiers. And many people would gladly accept the overlordship of the people who gathered them and made a city out of them. It gave them greater safety, a sense of identity, and bonds with a great nation and desirable culture, not to mention a powerful religion.

Nobody in 1820s America knew anything about this. Yet Captain Moroni goes through the wilderness building cities exactly as Mayans could and did. And the author of the Book of Mormon didn't even make a big deal about it—just took it for granted as being the way the world worked. Of course you can build instant cities in the wilderness, without bringing in outside settlers. So it seemed to Mormon. But could it possibly have seemed that way to Joseph Smith?

Lawyers. The appearance of lawyers in the Book of Mormon is assumed by many to be proof that this is an American artifact. After all, Joseph Smith and his family had plenty of reason to have a low opinion of lawyers, and the references to lawyers in the Book of Mormon are hardly flattering.

But there is nothing uniquely American about lawyers. The Romans had lawyers, too, and that the Roman pattern of lawyers was a lot more like what the Book of Mormon used than any American lawyers that Joseph Smith was acquainted with. That is, a lawyer like Zeezrom seemed to be effective, not because of more skillful manipulation of law, but because of his persuasiveness and personal influence. He would take someone under his protection and speak as personal advocate. With Zeezrom on your side, you would win, not because he understood the law, but because of his rhetoric and his reputation for power. Furthermore, the prosecution of Alma and Amulek seemed to originate with the lawyers themselves as the complainants, while Alma and Amulek had no defense attorney, but rather spoke for themselves. It doesn't follow the American pattern.

Naming. In fact, the only thing that makes Zeezrom and his ilk seem American is the fact that Joseph Smith translated the Nephite word for the role they played in Nephite society as the English word lawyer. And this is exactly right. If Joseph Smith was receiving the pure knowledge of what Mormon meant as they wrote, he would still have to put it down in English. In a few rare cases, the idea he was trying to translate had no English equivalent, and so we find cureloms and cumoms. But most of the time, there was some English word that came to Joseph Smith, a word that was close enough to convey the idea. As with all translation, though, the words are never exact and never can be. It is the most correct translation possible, but a perfect translation is not possible. So for Joseph Smith to apply the word lawyer to an advocate in a legal system that was not very close to the American legal system can be misleading, but it is still the most correct possible translation given the language that the Prophet had available to him at the time.

In fact, the very lack of exotic names supports the genuineness of Joseph Smith's translation. Science fiction writers and critics are quite aware of a long tradition of what James Blish called "shmeerps." Blish pointed out how silly it was that most science fiction writers, when trying to show an alien fauna, would produce a creature that looked like a rabbit and acted like a rabbit and was treated like a rabbit, and yet it was called a "shmeerp." This is ludicrous, of course. People migrating to a new land with strange plants and animals will use familiar names for the new creatures. Thus the English immigrants to America called the bison "buffaloes" and referred to maize as "Indian corn" and finally just "corn," even though in England that word had been a generic term for grain. The English felt no need to come up with new names for items that were "close enough."

Surely the Nephites followed the same pattern, using old words for new objects. Thus, if in fact there were no horses in America at the time of the Book of Mormon, the Hebrew word for horse could still quite readily be applied to some other animal that functioned like a horse. Furthermore, the language Mormon wrote in may well have been an ideographic language, in which case it would hardly matter what the spoken word for a particular animal was, as long as Nephite writers had agreed to use the old "horse" ideograph to refer to that animal. Thus it is no more surprising that the word "horse" appears in the Book of Mormon than that the word "buffalo" was used in a nation where there were no buffaloes, but only bison.