In telling us that he hasn’t made a “full account,” Nephi highlights the first layer of Book of Mormon abridgments: like all memoirists, he and other writers only recorded a small portion of the events that occurred in their lives. They geared their narratives for their perceived audiences and shaped the text accordingly. One of the most complex aspects of the Book of Mormon is that this process was repeated again by the book’s final editors in the fifth century CE, Mormon and Moroni, who sifted through all the components of the written text handed down through the centuries and selected only those pieces that they thought would be most helpful to readers living during and after the time when the Book of Mormon came forth (i.e., the 1820s and onward).