Okay, but the story does mention having to find ore, and bang rocks together and make bellows out of skins to make a fire hot enough to melt the ore, to make metal tools for building a vessel. These details could have been omitted entirely, if the goal were only to tell the larger-purpose story of Nephi building a ship under God's instruction to cross the ocean.Kishkumen wrote: ↑Tue May 31, 2022 2:06 pmStorytelling is different from writing modern history. ...
It just may be that the story of Nephi building a ship was written with other goals in mind than accurately describing how to build a sea-going vessel to those who might find themselves on the run, traveling in the wilderness. Those aspects of the story that are not salient in light of the author's larger purpose are not mentioned.
No coherent story is told through these awkward details; they're introduced but then abandoned perfunctorily without ever having gone anywhere. You can include excessive but accurate detail and make a good history that is not a good story, or cut to the chase and make a good story that isn't good history. Raising issues like ore and hot fire, but then never doing anything with them that is either informative or interesting, is not good as either story or history.
The only effect these details achieve in the story is to double down on the literal claim that this ship-building really did happen with real metal tools made from scratch. Like a forged manuscript that literally stammers with pages of reduplicated syll-syll-syllables written out fully like that, just to reinforce its claim to have been written by the Emperor Claudius, this is a text which is dishonest in itself, even apart from its author.