Social: The evidence suggests that there is an emphasis in Ammonihah on the reign of law and the judges. After the people begin to be more ready to accept the message because there are two witnesses to it, the lawyers step in to question Amulek. If they are able to find that Amulek breaches their law, then they will be able to throw them into prison, or kill them.
This situation requires some explanation for modern readers who are more familiar with the legal systems of the United States or Great Britain. In both of those countries, law is relegated to the secular, and religious differences are left to the church. We have a very different situation in Ammonihah. Alma and Amulek are not talking politics, they are talking religion. Nevertheless, they are to be question about the law. In a modern legal system with rigid separation between church and state, this would not be possible.
Ammonihah is not a modern city, however, it is an ancient one, and the very conception of what a “lawyer” might be can be different from what our modern perspective prepares us for when using that word. We cannot be certain precisely what category of functionary is indicated by the term “lawyer” in the Book of Mormon. As we have seen, Joseph Smith selected his vocabulary for the Book of Mormon from the well of the King James Version of the Bible, and that text uses “lawyer” in the New Testament where the better definition might be “scribe.”
In an ancient society where there was no distinct line between politics and religion, the lawyer was someone with a knowledge of the law, which included the religious laws. In the Bible, the lawyers would have been familiar with the Law of Moses. Their decisions would be handed down based on the nature of the offense against their understanding of the Mosaic Law. This is the situation we find in Ammonihah. Alma and Amulek have been speaking about religion. What laws have they broken?
It is obviously not clear that they have broken a law, but since they are speaking dangerous things, such as the destruction of the city, they are to be treated with caution. The lawyers want to examine them on their compatibility with their own religious law. Since this is a city that is predominantly of the order of the Nehors, there will be differences in religious interpretation, and the assumption that the lawyers might trip them up into saying something that would be worthy of confinement or death would be understandable.