The printer’s manuscript, in scribe 2’s hand, has the spelling striped, which is what the 1830 compositor set. But in the 1840 edition, striped was changed to stripped. The 1879 LDS edition accepted the 1840 stripped while the 1908 RLDS edition restored the earlier striped.
The 1840 emendation is theoretically possible since the scribes frequently neglected to double consonants when adding the -ed inflectional ending. In the following list of cases involving the letter p, Oliver Cowdery is responsible for nearly all of the misspellings. All of these examples are found in 𝓟 (there are no examples in the extant portions of 𝓞). There is also one clear example of stripped misspelled as striped, and this is by scribe 2 of 𝓟 (marked below with an asterisk):
stoped for stopped:
claped for clapped:
striped for stripped:
sliped for slipped:
The Mosaic law definitely made provision for punishment by whipping, as described in the book of Deuteronomy:
The King James Bible has 19 examples of the noun stripe but none of the verb stripe.
On the other hand, the verb strip is used in the scriptures, but never as a punishment (except possibly here in Alma 11:2). In the Bible, one’s clothes or other objects from the body may be stripped off. Or, figuratively speaking, one may be stripped of glory. Similarly, the Book of Mormon refers to being stripped of pride, envy, and uncleanness.
One particular question then is the possible use of stripe in Alma 11:2 as a verb. Although rare, the verb stripe ‘to beat or whip’ dates from at least Late Middle English and can be found up into the late 1800s. We have these citations (with original spellings) from the Oxford English Dictionary (see under the verb stripe):
Interestingly, in the 1557 edition of More’s original 1533 The apologye made by hym, the words for stripe(d) were spelled stryppe and stripped (that is, with two p’s, just like the 1840 edition’s stripped in Alma 11:2).
Thus stripe as a verb is quite possible for the Book of Mormon text. Moreover, since the Mosaic law provides for whipping, we should expect that these Israelite descendants in the Book of Mormon had provisions for striping as a punishment, especially since they explicitly claimed to follow the Mosaic law, as described by Nephi in 2 Nephi 5:10: “and we did observe to keep the judgments and the statutes and the commandments of the Lord in all things according to the law of Moses”.
Note further that the law of Mosiah, as stated in Alma 11:2, goes from the least to the worst punishment: first, the attempt is to get the guilty person to pay; if that fails, then the person is beaten; and ultimately, if that fails, the person is banished from the society. Stripping a person of his goods would actually be a type of forced payment and could fall under the first statement (“compelled to pay that which he oweth”).
The possibility that stripped in the LDS text is an error for striped is mentioned by John W. Welch on pages 24–27 of “Theft and Robbery in the Book of Mormon and in Ancient Near Eastern Law” (1992), a FARMS paper.
Summary: Restore the original spelling striped in Alma 11:2 since the reference is most probably to whipping, in accord with the Mosaic law.