It is not unusual to encounter, in literary works, details that are out of place as to their time. Those are called anachronisms which are placed by the writer in a time before the objects existed. An example of this is the mention of a clock in the play Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare.
Some anachronisms are more serious, though.
Joseph Smith claimed that the Book of Mormon , published in 1830, had been translated from golden plates that contained the accounts of the ancient inhabitants of the American continent. This claim has been challenged frequently since then for a variety of reasons, one of them being the use of anachronisms. Among many such anachronisms that occur in the Book of Mormon , the reference to synagogues is one to which we give attention. The word synagogue or some derivative of it occurs at least 25 times in the Book of Mormon , providing a fairly good picture of the role that it served in pre-Columbian civilizations. This statement assumes that these inhabitants of ancient America were aware of how the Jews built their synagogues.