Social: These are the educated men. They are “learned in all the arts and cunning of the people.” This definition appears to be quite parallel to the New Testament’s “lawyers” who were the scribes, or the ones with the ability to read and write, and therefore a unique access to the law. It is not an unreasonable speculation to assume that the Ammonihahite lawyers were also some type of scribe, with capabilities not shared by the larger population. It is no great speculation to include the ability to read and write as one of those differences.
The Maya scribe may have held a position that parallels these lawyers in Ammonihah. The recent translation of many of the Maya glyphs has led to tremendous new understandings of Maya history, including the ability to learn more about named individuals. From such inscriptions we learn that the Maya scribe was a member of the elite rank of society. There is one case where a pot-painter (using hieroglyphs as well as pictures) can be identified as a child of the seated ruler of Naranjo (Hammond, Norman. “Inside the Black Box: Defining Maya Polity.” In: Classic Maya Political History. Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 224). As elites with specialized skills, the Maya scribes would have a particular niche in society, analogous to the scribes of later Jerusalem in their knowledge of law through their ability to read and write, but with perhaps an even greater social standing. If the Ammonihahite lawyers have any conceptual parallels with the Maya scribes, it would not be surprising at all that they were the ones to defend the status quo, and that they were of sufficient importance to be allowed to speak.