Dan McClellan, the Scripture Translation Supervisor for the LDS Church, commented on how to better understand the Book of Mormon (#387, How to better understand the Book of Mormon, posted 2021-12-22):

Hey everybody, I have been asked recently to talk more about the Book of Mormon, so I want to share the piece of advice that I usually give when people ask me how to better understand it. If you want to understand the Book of Mormon better, you should approach it as a piece of 19th-century literature. This is not to say anything about its origins or to say you cannot maintain a conviction that it is an English translation of an ancient source text. It is to say, whatever its origins it is written in 19th century English for a 19th century target audience. This is made clear by a number of literary and linguistic conventions that are native to that time period. So, the better you can understand the literary, rhetorical, ideological, historical contexts of that time period—get your 1828 Webster’s out, read some of the other literature from that time period—the better you can do that the better you will come to understanding.