In Alma 31:10–11, when the Zoramites left Zarahemla, their objections were that they no longer wanted to observe the performances of the Church. Basically, they went inactive in the Church, and viewed the performances as just routines. They withdrew from the society, the historical bonds, and the social and ritual fellowship of the Church. They refused to pray and supplicate to God daily. They would pray only on one day of the week. They thought that offering daily prayers or sacrifices was too much. In addition to this, they also refused to pray that they might not enter into temptation.
That particular refusal tells us that this was a standard part of Nephite prayer. It would do us well today if it were to become an explicit standard part of all of our prayers as well. The Lord’s Prayer says, “Lead us not into temptation,” and I believe that we all too rarely ask that we be protected against the temptations of the devil, as the Lord instructed the Nephites to do in 3 Nephi 18:18.
Next, the Zoramites perverted the ways of the Lord. The text does not clearly set out what that means, but the ways of the Lord, the way or the walk of the Lord in Hebrew, is the word halakhah. So, they may have perverted the life, that halakhic way, of living. This could have meant that they started mixing meat and milk, or that they stopped observing the Sabbath day. There were likely many important religious rules under the Law of Moses that they simply stopped observing.
Speaking of the Sabbath, one of the things that the Zoramites did is mentioned in Alma 31:12. They built a synagogue where they gathered themselves together. The word synagogue comes from two Greek words that mean to gather together. We do not know what the Nephite word for synagogue would have been. However, the gloss on that, that they “did gather themselves together” (31:12) in the synagogue, indicates that the name itself may have been related to that gathering function accurately enough. They gathered themselves one day a week, “which day they did call, the day of the Lord” (31:12). Notice that the Zoramites did not specify that it was the Sabbath Day, which would have brought with it all of the Sabbath rules and regulations. The text does not even say which day of the week “the day of the Lord” was for the Zoramites. They picked a day, and called it the day of the Lord. Perhaps Sabbath observance was another big problem for them and they wanted to deflect attention away from the Sabbath by calling the day simply “the day of the Lord.”
Book of Mormon Central, “Why Did Alma and Amulek Preach in Synagogues? (Alma 16:13),” KnoWhy 124 (June 17, 2016).