Two Interesting Parallels to the Gadianton Robbers of the Book of Mormon

There are a few interesting echoes of the Gadianton robbers in Ethan Smith’s 1825 book View of the Hebrews. In relating the events leading up to the collapse of Jewish civilization in 70 A.D., Smith reports that the people divided into warring factions that slayed and murdered each other with such fury that the bodies of the dead were heaped up in great piles (cp. Alma 16:11, 28:11, and Ether 14:21-22). And then, he reports,

To add to the horrid calamities of the times occasioned by bloody factions, Judea was infested by bands of robbers and murderers, plundering their towns and cutting in pieces such as made any resistance, whether men, women, or children.[1]

That Smith sees these as typical developments in the decline of a society under divine judgment is evident from his quotation of the Latin proverb, “Whom God will destroy, he gives up to madness.”[2]

Later in the same book, when citing prophecies about the last days, Smith makes numerous references to “Gog and his bands”: these he interprets as the assembled powers of antichrist that will assault Israel in the battle of Armageddon.[3] The use of the word “bands” implies that he sees the bands of Gog as recapitulating the destructive work of the robber bands of 70 AD. Smith is fond of typological interpretation, and explicitly says that the destruction of Jerusalem was a type of the battle of the last day.[4] Thus the bands of Gog represent both the forces arrayed against the old Jerusalem and the forces that will be arrayed against the New one.

If the author of the Book of Mormon read View of the Hebrews, these passages might have suggested to him the likelihood that a band of robbers, murderers, and plunderers would be active in America in the last days: a precursor to the judgment of Gentile society. There is, however, no reference in View of the Hebrews to these bands engaging in secret covenants. If View of the Hebrews was the inspiration for the Gadiantons, then their sinister ritual practices were an innovation original with the Book of Mormon’s author.

Ethan Smith’s robbers were found by him in Josephus’s Wars of the Jews. Is it possible that Wars of the Jews influenced the Book of Mormon directly, without any mediation from Ethan Smith? Josephus’s robbers are definitely suggestive. They joined together into a “band of wickedness” (4:3:3), and “joined in the conspiracy by parties” (4:7:2). These robbers “omitted no kind of barbarity; for they did not measure their courage by their rapines and plunderings only, but proceeded as far as murdering men.” In their murder they “began with the most eminent persons in the city; for the first man they meddled with was Antipas, one of the royal lineage” (4:3:4; cp. Helaman 1-2). The robbers eventually became such a problem that they engaged in mass slaughter, leaving cities, villages, and holy places utterly desolate. Even more suggestively, Josephus’s robbers did enter into an agreement to kill the innocent (5:1:5), and the leaders of the factions did cut the throat of anyone suspected of wanting to desert to the Romans (5:10:2). Certainly the chaos caused by the robbers according to Josephus is more commensurate with the Book of Mormon than anything suggested in the Bible.

However, although Joseph Smith owned a copy of Wars of the Jews at a later date, it was an edition published in 1830, and so could not have been used in the production of the Book of Mormon. An 1806 edition of Wars was available at the Manchester subscription library, and may have been available in the public library in Palmyra as well.[5] That Joseph read it prior to 1829 is therefore not impossible, but it seems unlikely.  Probably the explanation for the Book of Mormon's Gadiantons lay elsewhere, in some combination of anti-Masonry and biblical narrative.

NOTES:
[1] Ethan Smith, View of the Hebrews; or the Tribes of Israel in America (Poultney, Vt.: Smith & Shute, 1825), 29-30.
[2] Ibid., 31.
[3] Ibid., 45, 54-55, 65, 243.
[4] Ibid., 15, 45, 259.
[5] Robert Paul, "Joseph Smith and the Manchester (New York) Library," BYU Studies 22, no. 3 (1982): 14.