The printer’s manuscript reads scourged here in Mosiah 17:13, but this word is most likely an error for scorched. The word scourge literally refers to whipping and lashing, and it is rather difficult to scourge anyone with fagots (bundles of sticks tied together for burning people at the stake). One could try to interpret scourge in verse 13 as having its figurative sense of ‘to punish, afflict, or torment’, although “they tormented his skin with fagots / yea even unto death” sounds odd given the specific reference to doing something to “his skin with fagots”. Indeed, if scourged were correct here in Mosiah 17:13, we would expect something quite simple like “and scourged him unto death”.
Of course, the following verse (Mosiah 17:14) actually uses the verb scorch to refer to the burning of the outer surface of Abinadi’s body (“and now when the flames began to scorch him”). The use of the verb scorch in this context seems strange to modern readers, but in Early Modern English scorch was sometimes used to refer to burning people at the stake, as in the following quote from Elizabethan times (cited here with regularized accidentals):
For the original citation, see page 490 in volume 1 of The Roanoke Voyages, edited by David Beers Quinn (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1955); this passage is also cited on page 8 of Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins, 1998). Given this historical usage, the emended reading “they took him and bound him and scorched his skin with fagots / yea even unto death” makes perfectly good sense.
We have the following extant spellings for the word scourge in the Book of Mormon manuscripts; the scribe was Oliver Cowdery except for scribe 2 of 𝓟 in the last instance:
𝓞 𝓟
1 Nephi 2:24 Scourge scorge
1 Nephi 19:9 scourge scourge
1 Nephi 19:13 scourged scourged
2 Nephi 5:25 scorge scorge
2 Nephi 5:25 scor( ) scorge
2 Nephi 6:9 ( rg)e scorge
2 Nephi 20:26 — scourge
2 Nephi 25:16 ( c)orged scourged
Jacob 3:3 — scorge
Mosiah 3:9 — scourge
Mosiah 15:5 — scorged
Mosiah 17:13 — scourged
Alma 23:2 scourge scourge
Alma 52:10 scour >+ scourge screen > scourge
3 Nephi 20:28 — scourge
The word scorch is much less frequent in the text; it occurs only three times in the extant textual sources (Mosiah 17:14, Alma 15:3, and Alma 32:38) and is always spelled correctly. The common misspelling scorge for scourge in the manuscripts supports the possibility that for Mosiah 17:13 the word scorched in the original manuscript could have first been misread as scorged and then spelled as scourged in the printer’s manuscript.
Another possible explanation for the misspelling scorge is that scourge may have been pronounced by Joseph Smith and his scribes as /skbr¸j/ rather than /skfr¸j/. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary lists /skbr¸j/ as an alternative pronunciation for scourge. Such a pronunciation would more readily lead to mishearing scorched /skbrcˇt/ as /skbr¸jd/ as well as to misspelling scourged as scorged in 𝓞. Other misspellings in the manuscripts support the tendency to extend the spelling or to cases of /br/ when immediately preceded by /k/ or /s/:
concorse (for concourse)
intercorse (for intercourse)
sorce (for source)
But the most significant factor in analyzing Mosiah 17:13 is that elsewhere the text always refers to Abinadi as having been burned to death, not whipped, lashed, or beaten:
From a literal point of view, the use of scourged in Mosiah 17:13 contradicts all other references to Abinadi’s “death by fire”, thus forcing one to interpret scourged as meaning something like ‘tormented’. But such vague language is inconsistent with the detailed language found everywhere else in this description of Abinadi’s death. The critical text will therefore emend Mosiah 17:13 to read that Abinadi was “scorched with fagots / yea even unto death”.
Summary: Replace scourged with scorched in Mosiah 17:13; scourged does not make much sense, given all other references to Abinadi’s death as “by fire”; the incorrect reading scourged seems to be the result of either mishearing or misreading scorched as scourged; the word scourge may have been pronounced /skbr¸j/, which would have facilitated the replacement of scorched with scourged.