In an insightful answer to the question What do you find interesting about the Book of Mormon?, Latter-day Saint apologist D. Charles Pyle wrote the following about Alma 13:1:
The Book of Mormon had a very unusual way of looking at things in the English translation (a way not seen in the King James Version of the Bible), as seen at Alma 13:1:
And again, my brethren, I would cite your minds forward to the time when the Lord God gave these commandments unto his children; and I would that ye should remember that the Lord God ordained priests, after his holy order, which was after the order of his Son, to teach these things unto the people.
(Alma 13:1)
But this referred to events that took place in the past! Is this an error of the Book of Mormon, or is the translation so clearly showing the meaning that the underlying meaning of the text shines through? One day, a number of years ago, while flipping through a Bible I had just purchased to examine the usefulness of what I had purchased, I found the following:
The Hebrews ‘backed into’ time, i.e., they saw the past as ‘before’ them and the future was behind!
(Spiros Zodhiates, Th. D., in The Hebrew and Greek Key Study Bible (1988), p. 1632.)
I was reminded of both Alma 13:1 and 1 Nephi 1:2. Joseph Smith did not learn to read Hebrew until 1835–1836. He could not have known any of this. Hebrew grammars in his day did not discuss this.
Interestingly, there are still some modern cultures that think of the past and future in like-manner, adding to the plausibility of the Book of Mormon, at least on this point, such as Arabic speakers from Morocco. In an article by the Association For Psychology Science by Juanma de la Fuente, Julio Santiago, Antonio Román, Cristina Dumitrache, and Daniel Casasanto entitled “When You Think About It, Your Past Is in Front of You: How Culture Shapes Spatial Conceptions of Time” we have a discussion of such. As we read in the abstract (emphasis added):
In Arabic, as in many languages, the future is “ahead” and the past is “behind.” Yet in the research reported here, we showed that Arabic speakers tend to conceptualize the future as behind and the past as ahead of them, despite using spoken metaphors that suggest the opposite. We propose a new account of how space-time mappings become activated in individuals’ minds and entrenched in their cultures, the temporal-focus hypothesis: People should conceptualize either the future or the past as in front of them to the extent that their culture (or subculture) is future oriented or past oriented. Results support the temporal-focus hypothesis, demonstrating that the space-time mappings in people’s minds are conditioned by their cultural attitudes toward time, that they depend on attentional focus, and that they can vary independently of the space-time mappings enshrined in language.
Elsewhere, in the conclusion (to whet your appetite to peruse the rest of the article . . .) we read the following about Moroccan Arabic speakers:
In spoken Arabic, the future is “ahead” and the past is “behind” the speaker, as in Spanish, English, and many other languages. According to the results of a temporal diagram task, young adult Spanish speakers conceptualize time as predicted by these linguistic metaphors. By contrast, Moroccan Arabic speakers conceptualize the past as ahead of them and the future as behind them, which reveals a striking dissociation between space-time mappings in the language and thought of these two groups.
If anything, this highlights the importance of reading the Book of Mormon (and other ancient texts, canonical and non-canonical) in light of how ancients perceived things, not as how us moderns do.
