Culture: The evidence suggests a preoccupation with legalism in Ammonihah. Once the condition of two witnesses is met, the lawyers step up to question Amulek, hoping to find a breach of law that would allow his and Alma’s imprisonment or execution.
Modern readers who are familiar with U.S. or British legal systems may be puzzled about why secular law is being applied to religious differences, instead of leaving them to the church. However, in this ancient city, there is no separation between church and state. Even in Zarahemla’s conceptually segregated political and religious sphere, the separation allowed for plurality but did not conceptually separate religion from law. Nor can we be certain who a “lawyer” might be or his qualifications. Joseph Smith drew heavily on the King James Version of the Bible for his Book of Mormon vocabulary, and the New Testament frequently uses “lawyer” where a better word might be “scribe.”
Where no rigid distinction existed between politics and religion, knowledge of the law included religious law. Biblical lawyers would have been familiar with the law of Moses and would have defined offenses by how an action violated the Mosaic law. What laws might Alma and Amulek have broken? Possibly none, but since they are speaking of the city’s destruction, the lawyers want to examine their conformity to the Ammonihahite religious law. Since the the interpretation of law would be drawn from the order of the Nehors, differences in religious interpretation might allow the lawyers to cause Alma and Amulek to stumble in their answers, resulting in being judged guilty.