Cite your minds forward

I noticed wording in Alma 13:1 that caught my attention

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 is clearly talking about times past. "These commandments" refers to the time after Adam and Eve were cast out of the garden and God started revealing his plan through angels as discussed in Alma 12. Then why does he want to cite their minds forward? Would not "cite your minds back to the time..." be a better choice of words here?

There may be a simple answer to this of course, not even worth spending a blog post on. Perhaps an error by Mormon or Joseph Smith's scribe? Anomalies can and will naturally be found in a long text like the Book of Mormon. But the reason I am spending a (speculative) post on this, is the possibility of ancient traditions that I see in this weird phrasing.

I posted previously on the somewhat complex topic of time and cardinal directions in ancient Israelite culture. The Hebrew word, qedem, has diverse meanings such as "front", "east" and "formerly". As explained in that post, Israelites would by default orient themselves towards the east. What they faced was the seen world, the past. The unseen and unknown future was behind them, at least figuratively. This explains the diversity of meanings. Qedem can both be a noun and an adverb. Based on this, citing the minds of the people forward to the past makes sense. But it requires a particular ancient Israelite context. Perhaps Alma used a Nephite word similar to qedem and the English translation of it is quite literal. This is very speculative of course, but for me an interesting possibility for a phrase that otherwise makes little sense.

Here is an example from the Book of Job to support my theory:

Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him (Job 23:8)

Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me (Job 29:2)

This is the KJV translation. Both of the bolded words are translated from the Hebrew, qedem. Entirely different words in English translated based on context.