Lacking the original of the Book of Mormon, however, it is less clear whether we have an anachronism of translation or a historical anachronism. We must base our conclusion on the term’s context. If the context does not favor that translation, then we may ascribe the lexeme to the translation layer rather than the original text. If the text uses the terms in contexts that support the lexeme’s meaning, then that meaning is plausible for the original.

An excellent example is Jeremiah 51:21: “And with thee will I break in pieces the horse and his rider; and with thee will I break in pieces the chariot and his rider.” It is abundantly clear that men ride horses and ride in chariots. The original Jeremiah text plausibly requires “horse” because it acts like a horse in the given context. The specifics are less clear when Jeremiah 46:9 declares: “Come up, ye horses; and rage, ye chariots; and let the mighty men come forth; the Ethiopians and the Libyans that handle the shield; and the Lydians that handle and bend the bow.” Although the “horses” behavior is less specific, the context is still a military setting, in which horses plausibly appear.

The situation is very different in the Book of Mormon. In Alma 18:9, the servants explain: “Behold, he is feeding thy horses. Now the king had commanded his servants . . . that they should prepare his horses and chariots, and conduct him forth to the land of Nephi.” This context explains that “horses” and “chariots” are positioned near the palace and that “horses” must be fed. Lamoni is going to the land of Nephi on a formal state visit (“a great feast appointed . . . by the father of Lamoni”) but the role of the horses and chariots is not clear. We assume that the horse pulls the chariot because of our background in Old World and modern contexts. However, the text itself does not say so. In fact, it is an assumption that the horses and chariots accompany the king; but the text, though it implies that meaning, it silent on the specifics.

Furthermore, most Old Testament occurrences of chariots are in a context of war; in contrast, the Book of Mormon occasion is a formal state visit. “Horses” and “chariots” reappear in a similar setting when Ammon and Lamoni hear that Ammon’s brother are in prison: “Lamoni . . . caused that his servants should make ready his horses and his chariots” for another state visit to the king of the land where they were held (Alma 20:6).

“Horses” and “chariots” appear together later in the Book of Mormon, but in a very different context: “And it came to pass in the seventeenth year, . . . the proclamation of Lachoneus had gone forth throughout all the face of the land, and they had taken their horses, and chair chariots, and their cattle, and all their flocks, and their herds, and their grain, and all their substance, and did march forth by thousands and by tens of thousands, until they had all gone forth to the place which had been appointed that they should gather themselves together, to defend themselves against their enemies” (3 Ne. 3:22).

Here, the Nephites are preparing for war, but among the belongings they transport to the gathering place—livestock, foodstuffs, “and all their substance”—and their “chariots.” Based on this verse alone, we might actually suspect that the horse was considered food. They did not use their chariots in warfare but simply moved them along with the rest of their property to that they did not become booty for their enemies.

Given the two formal visits with which horses and chariots are associated, they seem to be reserved for these special occasions. Book of Mormon horses move and eat, but they never pull anything and no one ever rides Them. They never perform the functions we expect of a horse, nor do horses impact Nephite society in the same way as all other horseback societies form the nomadic Mongols (food, transport, valuable property) to the sedentary farmers of Europe (plowing, riding, beasts or burden, etc.).

In the case of the Book of Mormon, if we replaced the word horse with a made-up word (such as glerk) we would never suspect that a glerk was a horse. Thus, the text does not require the particular word represented in the translation. Although not conclusive evidence, it at least opens the plausibility that the translation is the cause of the anachronism, not the text and that it resembles the example of “candles” in the King James Version.

Did the translation mislabeling occur with the Nephites or with Joseph? Certainly, the Middle Eastern Nephites (who knew what horses looked like and what they were used for) might have mislabeled as “horses” the closer local quadrupeds that they found in the New World. However, retaining this mistaken label assumes that Hebrew continued to be their common language and that they continued to name local animals using Hebrew worlds. Those local animals already had names in the native languages; and if the Nephites adopted one of those languages as their lingua franca (preserving Hebrew as a sacred language), then there would have been no reason why they insisted on the mislabel (which would, at a minimum, have confused the local people and their own locally born children) rather than adopting the animal’s name in the native language. For example, even English-speakers identify the Mesoamerican ocelot by a word derived from Aztec ocelotl. The ocelot is not mislabeled; it is known by a borrowed identification. Similarly, out very common words “chocolate” and “tomato” are derived from Aztec loan words: chocalatl and tomatl. I find it much more likely that anachronistic vocabulary such as “horse” is the result of the modern translator’s imposition of his language culture than such words represent a literalistic translation of a Nephite cross-label.

The evidence for the translation based solely on vocabulary is mixed. The plausible transliteration of names (and perhaps titles) may represent literalist equivalence. However, the majority of the evidence favors functional equivalence. Therefore, the most reasonable position is to posit functional equivalence—unless a specific argument can be made for literalistic equivalance.