Rather than include details of events, Nephi writes a short sermon, a summary of Yahweh’s blessings on the group. Nephi does not suggest that Yahweh made that life easy, but rather that he made the Lehites equal to its demands.
S. Kent Brown reads much more into this verse:
In my view, Nephi’s use of the verb “to sojourn” points to one or more periods of servility. Scattered clues hint that family members lived in a dependent or servile relationship to desert peoples—whom they could not avoid—suffering difficulty and conflict.
We notice that the verbal phrase “did sojourn” appears in Nephi’s restrained retelling of the extended trip deep into the southern Arabian desert, through an environment whose harsh character has become well known to the West only relatively recently. Moreover, one observes that the expression to sojourn often means “to live as a resident alien” in territory where one owns no property and has no family roots. Further, “in not a few passages throughout the Old Testament the verb definitely has the connotation “to live as a subject”—be it as a resident alien, hireling, slave or inferior wife.
The Lehites would not voluntarily have lingered in this challenging region. However, the family would have required some means of paying the tributes and purchasing needed replacement provisions on the trail. Randolf Linehan, an attorney specializing in international commerce, suggests that it is the education of Lehi’s wealthy family that provided the labor exchange on this journey. He states: “Anyone who could read in their period of time already had a talent which would be similar to an MD traveling abroad today.” While using their education in exchange for goods may not be hard physical labor, it may yet have been considered “sojourning” because the family was unable to sustain themselves without performing that type of labor for other people.
Redaction: If Brown’s hypothesis is correct, why would Nephi also fail to mention such periodic servitude? One reason might be a feeling of shame. A second reason is that, even though Nephi compares his family’s journey to Israel’s exodus and forced (or negotiated) servitude would connect both stories, such a comparison would have made the stories nonsymmetrical. The Israelites departed from captivity, and the Lehites, by leaving Jerusalem, have already fulfilled this parallel by escaping from the coming captivity that will befall Jerusalem. A third reason is that it apparently did not specifically enhance Nephi’s spiritual development.