The chief judge is continuing his dual meanings. He has connected the burning of the martyrs with Alma's discussion of the punishment of the wicked in a lake of fire and brimstone. Now he sarcastically links the obvious fact that the people died as a failure of salvation. The chief judge says: "ye had not power to save those who had been cast into the fire; neither has God saved them." One of the major ideological differences between the order of Nehor and the Nephite religion revolved around the concept of salvation. Alma had been preaching the necessity of salvation from sin, and so the chief judge mocks them by noting that there was no salvation for the sacrificed.