Executive Summary: Ezekiel (English → Arabic)

Why it matters

Ezekiel gives Arabic-speaking readers — many of Muslim-background — the Bible’s most sustained meditation on God’s glory, judgment, and restoring presence, anchored in a core passage (37:1-14, the Valley of Dry Bones) that Muslim readers often already know through a strikingly similar Quranic image (36:78-79). That overlap is a genuine gift and a genuine hazard: done well, it opens a door; done carelessly, it collapses three distinct concepts — Ezekiel’s national restoration, Christ’s unique resurrection, and Yawm al-Qiyamah — into one, or triggers a near-identical collision with جوج وماجوج / يأجوج ومأجوج (Gog and Magog) in chapters 38-39. This Language Package extends the proven Romans baseline so every rendering decision in Ezekiel is made deliberately, not by default.

Key findings

• 24 doctrines analyzed, full 48-chapter coverage confirmed — no chapter silently skipped; low-content chapters explicitly marked “reviewed, no new load-bearing content.”
• 6 Critical-risk and 12 High-risk doctrines (18 total) require mandatory human theologian review; 5 Medium-risk doctrines require native speaker review; 1 Low-risk doctrine (lament genre) is automated-review only.
• 8 Critical-risk and 30 High-risk terms (38 total) were newly identified and added to the enforced translation memory, on top of 18 terms inherited exactly from the Romans baseline (god, lord, holy, holy_spirit, covenant, law, sin, righteousness, peace, israel, david, seed_of_david, gentiles, prophet, prophecy, glory, intercession, kingdom_of_god, resurrection).
• The single highest-stakes translation decision in the whole curriculum sits inside the core passage itself: Hebrew ruach shifts between wind, breath, and Spirit within fourteen verses (37:1-14) and must never be flattened to one Arabic word or defaulted to الروح القدس.
• Ezekiel introduces genuine positive bridge points absent from Romans — Ezekiel 18’s individual-accountability thesis echoes Quran 6:164/17:15/35:18; the river of life (ch.47) echoes Quranic paradise-river imagery — but each bridge carries a matching over-convergence risk that must be actively managed, not just noted.

Risks

• Gog and Magog (جوج وماجوج) vs. Quranic يأجوج ومأجوج — near-homophonic collision with a related but textually distinct Islamic apocalyptic tradition; highest-priority forbidden-substitution rule in the package, mandatory theologian footnote required at first occurrence.
• Dry-bones “resurrection” imagery (37:12-13) — must never use the noun القيامة (reserved for Christ’s historical resurrection); verb-only rendering required to avoid conflating three referents (national restoration / Christ’s resurrection / Yawm al-Qiyamah).
• The Vision of the New Temple (ch.40-48) — the single highest real-world sensitivity item in the curriculum given the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa site; teaching material must stay strictly within the ancient text’s typological trajectory.
• Individual Responsibility (ch.18) vs. Romans 5 — genuine convergence with Islamic no-inherited-guilt teaching risks being used to dismiss Romans’ federal-headship doctrine if not taught together deliberately.
• “Israel” / “land of Israel” in restoration contexts (ch.36-37, 47-48) — acute contemporary political-sensitivity, inherited from and intensified beyond the Romans baseline’s existing caution.
• Embodied presence language (“place of the soles of my feet,” 43:7) — runs directly against mainstream Islamic tanzih transcendence instincts; requires the same analogical caution Ezekiel’s own visionary language models.

Opportunities

• Ezekiel 37 and Quran 36:78-79 offer a rare, ready-made apologetic bridge into bodily resurrection hope — if the three referents are kept distinct rather than merged.
• Ezekiel 18’s individual-accountability teaching offers genuine common ground with Islamic denial of inherited guilt-transfer (Quran 6:164) — a positive entry point into deeper discussion of Romans 5.
• The river of life (ch.47) and Ezekiel’s careful, hedged visionary language about seeing God (ch.1: “likeness of,” “appearance of”) both offer constructive, non-confrontational openings into topics (paradise imagery, divine transcendence) where Islamic and Christian audiences already share vocabulary.
• “For my name’s sake” (20:9,14,22,44; 36:21-23,32) parallels Islamic tawhid’s emphasis on God’s self-sufficient honor while reinforcing — not undermining — the Grace doctrine’s insistence on unearned favor.

Recommended actions

1. Load assets/translation_memory.json (Ezekiel) alongside the Romans-baseline translation memory before any Phase 2 segment translation; never substitute a recorded rendering.
2. Route all 18 theologian-review doctrines and all 38 Critical/High terms through mandatory human theologian sign-off before publication, per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json.
3. Enforce the mandatory Gog-and-Magog disambiguation footnote at first occurrence (ch.38) without exception.
4. Apply the verb-only rule for Ezekiel 37:12-13’s dry-bones imagery in every occurrence, across every derivative teaching document.
5. Brief all human reviewers on the ruach-polysemy decision protocol (§ of 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md) before reviewing any material touching Ezekiel 36:26-27 or 37:1-14.
6. Keep all Temple-vision (ch.40-48) and Israel-restoration (ch.36-37, 47-48) material strictly within its ancient-text typological framing; do not permit derivative teaching content to drift into contemporary political commentary.

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See analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, analysis/04_comparative_theology.md, and analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md for full supporting detail behind every finding above.