Abinadi knows that he cannot separate the law of Moses from salvation, for the law is given to bring people into alignment with Jehovah. Thus, living the law of Moses is important. Abinadi picks up on his condemnation of the actions of the priests, and by extension the king and all the people, that they did not obey the law of Moses. He begins with the first law, as given in Exodus 20:3, “Thou shalt have no other God before me.” He declares that they have not obeyed that law.
There is no information in the text to tell us how King Noah’s people had violated that commandment. It appears that they had accepted other gods and images of gods. In a Mesoamerican context, this might suggest that there was some acceptance of the gods that other peoples around them believed in. Clearly, Jehovah continued to be their god, but they may have accepted other lesser gods, even if only in a cultural sense, rather than a religious sense. Historically, Christianity has often appropriated various gods that were among the peoples they encountered, incorporating them with perhaps different names or titles, but retaining sufficient similarity as to ease the new people into Christianity from their previous religions. There are numerous examples from the later Christian conquest of Mesoamerica where this very thing happened.
There is no chapter break here in the 1830 edition. It appears that Orson Pratt added this chapter break because there is a shift from Abinadi speaking to the reaction of the king to his words.