As Alma was in the process of leaving Ammonihah, he received a message from an angel instructing him to return. As he entered the city, he was hungry and ask a man if he wouldn't give a humble servant of God something to eat. The man (Amulek) answered by saying: "I know that thou art a holy prophet of God, for thou art the man whom an angel said in a vision: Thou shalt receive" (Alma 8:20).
John Tvedtnes notes that a similar event happened nearly two millennia later. In 1886, Jacob Spori, a missionary for the LDS Church in the Middle East, on board a ship bound for the Palestinian port-city of Haifa, had a dream in which he learned that he should walk down a certain street. In his dream, he saw a blacksmith with a short coal-black beard, whom he was told would be prepared to receive the message of the restored gospel. Spori reported that, while walking down the street in Haifa (during his first visit to that city), he was met by the blacksmith, Georg Johann Grau. Grau came running out to see him and informed him that he had seen Spori in a dream and had been told that the stranger would have a divine message for him. On August 29, 1886, Georg and Magdalena Grau were the first persons baptized by priesthood authority in modern times in Israel, the land of Jesus. [John A. Tvedtnes, "He Shall Prepare a Way," in The Most Correct Book, p. 109]
Alma 8:20 Therefore, go with me into my house and I will impart unto thee of my food ([Illustration]): In A.D. 1500 the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, utilized housing units somewhat like those from nearby Teotihuacan a thousand years earlier. This artist's reconstruction is said to show a "middle-class" Aztec house, but that may be an overstatement in terms of today's connotation. A typical home probably was less consciously decorated and somewhat more shopworn. Sorenson notes that most people would have had houses only large enough to contain their immediate family (consider "the poor" in Mosiah 4:24, Alma 5:55, etc.) But upper-class people must have had larger units into which guests could be received. Amulek, a man of means (see Alma 10:4), had a sizeable household; his establishment included "my women, and my children," and, perhaps in the same household, "my father and my kinsfolk" (Alma 10:11). The hospitality he offered Alma was returned to him when destitute and exiled from his home community (see Alma 15:16), Amulek was taken into Alma's own house (see Alma 15:18). [John L. Sorenson, Images of Ancient America, pp. 61, 63]