Linguistic Gap Analysis
Linguistic Gap Analysis: Jonah (English → Arabic)
1. Purpose and Scope
This analysis identifies, for the full book of Jonah (chapters 1–4, with Jonah 3:1-10 as the theological anchor passage), where Arabic:
- Lacks vocabulary for a doctrine or nuance the English/Hebrew source requires (missing vocabulary), and
- Has vocabulary, but that vocabulary sits inside a semantic neighborhood already claimed by mainstream Islamic theological usage, requiring deliberate “fencing” so the Christian sense is not silently absorbed into the Islamic one.
It also resolves transliteration-vs-paraphrase decisions for terms without a clean one-word Arabic equivalent, and ranks the highest-risk ambiguities specific to this book for downstream Phase 2 translation and Phase 3 review routing.
Full-book coverage confirmation: all four chapters of Jonah have been reviewed. Chapter-by-chapter distribution of load-bearing vocabulary is summarized in §5.
2. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
For each of the five curriculum doctrines, this table lists the available Arabic terms, their weaknesses, and the recommended translation strategy. “Reuse” indicates the baseline Romans Language Package already supplies the correct term; “Extend” indicates a new term proposed for this curriculum, following the baseline’s schema and risk framework.
2.1 God’s Compassion for the Nations
| Available Arabic term(s) | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| حنون، رحيم، رؤوف (Exodus 34:6 formula, Jonah 4:2) | Genuinely overlaps with الرحمن / الرحيم, two of Allah’s most prominent names — a real bridge, but Islamic usage does not specifically foreground mercy extended to a hostile Gentile nation with no covenant claim. Readers may affirm the words while missing the doctrine’s actual scandal. | Reuse + extend context. Keep حنون/رحيم/رؤوف (standard Van Dyck OT idiom) but pair every occurrence with explicit teaching framing: this mercy moves outward, to Israel’s violent enemy, not merely inward to the covenant community. Do not treat the vocabulary overlap as doctrinal overlap. |
| الأمم (Gentiles/nations) | Baseline term, low collision risk on its own, but in Jonah the “nation” in view is Nineveh — Assyria, the ancient empire later associated with the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel. | Reuse baseline term (gentiles = الأمم) but supply historical framing note: Nineveh is not a neutral “other nation” but Israel’s imperial oppressor-to-be; the doctrine’s force depends on this being a hated enemy, not an abstract foreigner. |
| كثير الرحمة (chesed, 4:2) | Risk of collapse into baseline النعمة (grace). | Fence explicitly. Chesed = covenant-loyal steadfast compassion (OT category); النعمة = NT unmerited justifying favor apart from works (soteriological category). Related, not interchangeable. Never substitute one for the other in either direction. |
2.2 Repentance and Divine Mercy
| Available Arabic term(s) | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| يتوب / التوبة (root ت-و-ب) | This is the single most crowded semantic neighborhood in the entire book. تَوْبَة is a major, well-defined Islamic theological category (Quran 9:104, 66:8; the tawba sequence of remorse, cessation, restitution, resolve, held to secure Allah’s forgiveness through the sincerity/completeness of the human act itself). Using it at the verse level risks silently importing that entire framework into 3:8-10. | Fence with a two-tier strategy (see §4 below): use يرجع (“turn back,” Van Dyck precedent) at the narrative/verse level for שׁוּב (shuv); reserve التوبة strictly for doctrinal-teaching sections discussing repentance as a biblical-theological category, and pair every doctrinal use of التوبة with an explicit contrast note distinguishing gospel-shaped repentance (response to revealed mercy already offered, not the ground of forgiveness) from tawba’s self-initiated remorse-to-forgiveness sequence. |
| يندم / يرجع عن (נחם, divine relenting) | Risk of implying God discovers error, changes His mind out of ignorance, or is otherwise imperfect — collides with Islamic qadar (fixed, eternally-known divine decree), which would read change-of-disposition language as a claim of divine fallibility. | Fence explicitly. Teach 4:2’s citation of Exodus 34:6 as controlling context: God’s relenting is the consistent outworking of an already-fixed compassionate character, not a revision of it. Never use يتوب for God’s own action (that root belongs exclusively to the human-repentance neighborhood in this book’s fencing strategy). |
| الشر / البلاء / الكارثة (רָעָה, dual sense in 3:10) | Arabic has no single word spanning both “moral evil” and “impending calamity” the way Hebrew רָעָה does; the wordplay that makes the verse’s logic vivid (God relents of the [calamity] because they turned from their [evil]) is unrecoverable in one lexical item. | Split deliberately, flag the loss. Use الشر for the moral sense, البلاء/الكارثة for the threatened-judgment sense, and add an explicit teaching note that the single Hebrew word’s pun is the verse’s rhetorical hinge and has been necessarily split in Arabic. |
| آمنوا / الإيمان (3:5) | Direct root-cognate opportunity with Pauline πίστις already secured by the baseline (faith = الإيمان); risk is Islamic iman’s creedal-assent-plus-practice profile overshadowing the personal-trust sense, exactly as flagged in the baseline “faith” entry. | Reuse baseline term exactly. Reinforce, per baseline convention, that Nineveh’s belief is immediate personal trust in a word from God delivered without prior covenant, law, or creed — an Old Testament preview of the Gentile-inclusion pattern Romans later develops doctrinally. |
2.3 Human Reluctance versus God’s Universal Love
| Available Arabic term(s) | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| نزل (√ירד, “went down”) | No inherent weakness in the word itself; the risk is inconsistency — if translators vary the verb across occurrences (Joppa, the ship, the hold, the sea depths), the deliberate literary descent-motif contrasting with God’s repeated “arise” command disappears. | Lexical consistency mandate, not a collision-fencing issue: render every occurrence with the same root نزل. |
| قم، اذهب (קוּם לֵךְ, “arise, go”) | Same consistency risk: the command is given identically at 1:2 and 3:2, once disobeyed and once obeyed. | Verbatim repetition mandate: identical Arabic wording at both occurrences, so the reader can see Jonah’s second obedience mirror his first refusal. |
| غضب / احتد غضبه (חָרָה, Jonah’s anger) | Low collision risk with Islamic vocabulary; the interpretive risk is theological rather than lexical — readers may sympathize with Jonah’s anger as righteous zeal rather than see it as the book’s target of critique. | Teaching-note strategy, not lexical fencing: ensure surrounding material frames Jonah’s anger explicitly as the problem the book exposes (anger at God’s compassion to a Gentile enemy), not a neutral emotional report. |
| يرثي / يرقّ / يحنّ (חוּס, pity/compassion, 4:10-11) | The book’s closing line is a rhetorical question, not a statement; over-resolution in translation (turning it into a flat declarative) would blunt its convicting, unresolved force. | Preserve interrogative form exactly. Do not paraphrase the closing question into a statement of doctrine; let it remain open, as in the Hebrew. |
2.4 The Sovereignty of God over Creation
| Available Arabic term(s) | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| أعدّ / عيّن (מָנָה, “appointed”) | No inherent theological weakness; risk is again consistency — this verb governs four distinct objects (fish, plant, worm, wind) across the book, and if rendered with different verbs each time, the fourfold repetition pattern anchoring this doctrine is lost. | Lexical consistency mandate: render all four occurrences identically. |
| أرسل الرب ريحاً عظيمة (1:4, storm) | Risk is not lexical but grammatical/register: a passive or meteorological-sounding Arabic construction (“a great wind occurred”) would recast active divine causation as an impersonal weather event. | Preserve active divine subject in the Arabic verb form at every creation-command verse (storm, fish, plant, worm, wind, lot-casting outcome) so the doctrine of God’s active governance over both nature and chance is visible throughout, not only stated once. |
| القرعة (lot-casting, 1:7) | Minimal doctrinal risk; a possible pastoral tangent given general Islamic caution around divinatory practices, but this is a background ANE custom in the narrative, not an endorsed practice. | Low-risk; footnote only if raised pastorally, not a translation fencing issue. |
2.5 Jonah as a Sign Foreshadowing Christ’s Resurrection
| Available Arabic term(s) | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|
| القيامة (baseline: resurrection) | Reused exactly per baseline; the weakness is entirely upstream and apologetic, not lexical — per the baseline’s own note, Quran 4:157 denies the crucifixion occurred at all, so “resurrection” has no historical event to attach to unless the crucifixion is first established. | Reuse baseline term; mandatory apologetic scaffolding. Every occurrence connecting Jonah’s sign to Christ’s resurrection must first (re)establish the historicity of the crucifixion before invoking القيامة, exactly as required in the baseline Romans package. |
| آية يونان (sign of Jonah, NT reception term) | Not present in the Hebrew text; a Greek-layer theological label (Matthew 12:39-41; Luke 11:29-32) being retrofitted onto the OT narrative for typological teaching. Risk of the term sounding like a late imposition rather than the text’s own claim if introduced carelessly. | New term, Critical risk. Introduce explicitly as Christ’s own interpretive claim (attributed to Jesus, cited from the Gospels) rather than presenting it as if the phrase occurs in Jonah itself. Must be visibly linked to الحوت (great fish) and ثلاثة أيام وثلاث ليال (three days and three nights) as the concrete textual anchors of the typology. |
| الهاوية / الجب (Sheol/the pit, 2:2, 2:6) | Poetic death-language; risk of readers importing the fuller, developed Islamic barzakh intermediate-state doctrine onto what is experiential/poetic language in this context, or alternatively treating it as merely metaphorical exaggeration with no bearing on the resurrection typology’s textual credibility. | New term, High risk. Fence against both over-reading (full afterlife doctrine) and under-reading (mere metaphor): teach as the poetic register in which Jonah describes a real experience of death-and-return, which is precisely what makes the sign meaningful to Christ’s own use of it. |
| ثلاثة أيام وثلاث ليال | No semantic weakness; the risk is purely one of translation precision — any looseness in rendering the exact duration would weaken the numeric correspondence Matthew 12:40 depends on. | Critical risk. Render with exact numeric/durational fidelity, matching the established Arabic Gospel text of Matthew 12:40 word-for-word where possible, so the cross-reference is visibly identical rather than merely similar. |
3. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods
3.1 Missing Vocabulary (Arabic lacks a clean equivalent)
| Gap | Description | Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| רָעָה dual sense (moral evil / calamity, 3:10) | No single Arabic word spans both senses the way Hebrew רָעָה does within one verse. | Split into الشر (moral) and البلاء/الكارثة (calamity); flag the lost wordplay in teaching notes (see §2.2 above). Do not attempt an artificial coinage to force unity — this would read as stilted and obscure the verse’s plain sense. |
| נֶהְפָּכֶת dual sense (“overturned/destroyed” vs. “turned back/transformed,” 3:4) | Same root as Sodom’s destruction (Gen 19:25) but also carries a “turn” nuance that the narrative outcome ironically fulfills (the city is spared — in effect “turned,” not “overturned”). | Select the primary judgment-sense (تُخرَّب / تُدمَّر) for the verse itself; the irony cannot be carried lexically in Arabic and must be surfaced explicitly in teaching material as a literary observation, not built into the verse translation itself. |
| קִיקָיוֹן exact botanical identity | Hebrew term of disputed identity (castor-bean plant vs. bottle-gourd); no precise Arabic botanical equivalent is agreed upon either. | Use the established Van Dyck rendering اليقطينة; note that exact botanical identity is doctrinally immaterial and should not be a translation stumbling block. |
| ”Sign of Jonah” as a compact NT theological label | Arabic has no pre-existing single-word equivalent for this compound typological category (it is a coined theological shorthand even in Greek/English). | Use the compound phrase آية يونان consistently, introduced with explicit sourcing to the Gospels (see §2.5). |
3.2 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods (Arabic has vocabulary, but it is already claimed by Islamic theological usage)
These are the neighborhoods requiring active “fencing” — deliberate teaching notes and, where the baseline precedent applies, deliberate avoidance of the crowded term in favor of a less-loaded alternative.
| Neighborhood | Islamic-claimed term(s) | Christian doctrinal need | Fencing strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Repentance | التوبة (tawba: remorse → cessation → restitution → resolve, understood to secure forgiveness through the completeness of the human act) | שׁוּב (shuv): turning that is a genuine, wholehearted human response, but occurs entirely within, and because of, a prior revealed word of warning-with-mercy, and secures nothing on its own (God’s relenting in 3:10 is His sovereign response, not an automatic mechanical result). | Two-tier vocabulary split (§2.2, §4): يرجع at verse level, التوبة reserved for doctrine-level discussion with mandatory contrast notes. |
| Divine relenting / change of disposition | (no single competing Islamic term, but the concept space of qadar — fixed, eternally-known divine decree — creates a strong background assumption that change-of-mind language about God signals imperfection) | נִחַם (nacham): God’s relenting is real and responsive, yet consistent with, not contradictory to, His unchanging compassionate character. | Never use יתוب-family vocabulary for God’s action; always anchor 3:9-10 and 4:2 together so the “change” is explicitly read as revealed-character consistency, not revision. |
| Mercy/compassion vocabulary | الرحمن، الرحيم، رحوم، رؤوف (God’s mercy names, said 5+ times daily in Muslim prayer and confession) | חַנּוּן וְרַחוּם, רַב־חֶסֶד (Exodus 34:6 formula): mercy that reaches, effectively and without covenant claim, a violent Gentile enemy nation. | Reuse the words (they are correct and a genuine bridge) but fence the direction and object of the mercy explicitly — outward to the hostile “other,” not inward to the pious in-group — since this is where the doctrine actually diverges from typical devotional usage. |
| Fasting | الصوم / الصيام (Ramadan: calendar-fixed, obligatory, communally regulated) | צוֹם in 3:5: spontaneous, unscheduled, urgent, city-wide contrition triggered by a specific warning, not a recurring religious obligation. | Reuse الصوم (no better word exists) but pair with an explicit note on the spontaneous/occasional nature of this fast versus the fixed obligatory calendar practice, so the doctrine of urgent repentance is not read as “Nineveh kept a Ramadan-like observance.” |
| Prophetic office | نبي (shared vocabulary, but framed by khatam an-nabiyyin — Muhammad as the final, superseding prophet) | נָבִיא: Jonah as one of a line of covenant prophets whose message and person (per Matthew 12:39-41) points forward typologically to Christ, who is greater than Jonah. | Reuse baseline نبي but always pair with fuller Christological framing at the point the “sign of Jonah” doctrine is introduced, so “prophet” is read as a pointer forward, not a terminal category. |
| Casting lots / divination-adjacent practice | General Islamic caution around divinatory practices (though not a single named theological term) | גּוֹרָל (goral): a narrative-descriptive ANE custom used by pagan sailors, not an endorsed model of decision-making for believers. | Low-risk; retain القرعة as a plain narrative description; no fencing required beyond noting (if raised pastorally) that the text describes rather than commends the practice. |
| Root ح-م-ا-س (violence, חָמָס) | No theological collision — the phonetic neighbor حماس (the militant organization’s name, an unrelated acronym) is a practical, not doctrinal, crowded-neighborhood risk. | חָמָס in 3:8: the violence/injustice from which Nineveh must turn. | Use العنف or الظلم rather than any transliteration nearer to the acronym’s spelling; flag for native-speaker review to confirm no unintended visual/phonetic association in final typeset text. |
4. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Term | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Jonah (proper name) | Established form, not transliteration-from-scratch: يونان | Follows the same logic as the baseline’s Jesus/يسوع decision: use the pre-Islamic/established Christian Arabic Bible form, never the Quranic يونس, even though both are phonetically “available.” This is a naming-convention decision, not a translation-choice in the ordinary sense. |
| Nineveh | Established transliteration: نينوى | Standard Van Dyck form; paraphrase (e.g., “the great Assyrian capital”) is inappropriate for a proper noun, but the doctrinal/teaching material accompanying it must carry the modern political-sensitivity framing (see glossary #2). |
| שׁוּב (turn/repent, human) | Paraphrase at verse level (يرجع); transliteration/loanword avoided; doctrinal term (التوبة) reserved for teaching level | This is the book’s most important transliteration-vs-paraphrase decision. A single Arabic term cannot serve both registers safely: the verse-level “turn back” (يرجع) keeps the narrative clear of the crowded tawba neighborhood, while the doctrinal-teaching-level term (التوبة) is needed for cross-curriculum consistency with NT μετάνοια vocabulary, but only with mandatory contrastive framing every time it is used. |
| נִחַם (relent, divine) | Paraphrase, not the human-repentance root: يندم عن غضبه / يرجع عن (القضاء الذي…) | Deliberately avoids any single-word transliteration or shared root with human repentance vocabulary; paraphrase is required to keep God’s action lexically and conceptually distinct from human tawba/shuv. |
| σημεῖον Ἰωνᾶ (sign of Jonah) | Fixed compound phrase, not single-word coinage: آية يونان | No single Arabic word carries this compact typological sense; a compound phrase, introduced with explicit Gospel sourcing, is preferred over inventing a novel one-word technical term. |
| קִיקָיוֹן (the plant) | Established transliteration/rendering: اليقطينة | Follows Van Dyck precedent rather than a generic paraphrase like “شجرة” (a tree) or “نبتة” (a plant), preserving textual specificity even though botanical identity is disputed. |
| דָּג גָּדוֹל / κῆτος (great fish) | Established rendering, cross-testament lock: الحوت (العظيم) | Not a paraphrase choice so much as a consistency mandate: because Matthew 12:40 uses the same Arabic word (بطن الحوت) for κῆτος, Jonah’s translation must use the identical word so the resurrection-sign vocabulary link is visible to the Arabic reader without cross-referencing two different words. |
| חֶסֶד (chesed) | Paraphrase (compound), not single-word transliteration: كثير الرحمة (for רַב־חֶסֶד) | No single Arabic word captures chesed’s covenant-loyal-steadfastness sense without either collapsing into النعمة (wrong register: NT unmerited justifying favor) or الرحمة alone (too generic, loses the “abounding/much” intensifier of רַב). The compound preserves both the intensifier and the compassion sense. |
| חָמָס (violence) | Paraphrase, avoiding transliteration near a loaded homograph: العنف / الظلم | Explicitly not a transliteration decision — the Hebrew root has no natural Arabic cognate transliteration in any case — but flagged here because the risk of accidental phonetic proximity to a contemporary politically loaded name (see §3.2) makes deliberate paraphrase-word selection (rather than any creative spelling) the safer path. |
5. Chapter-by-Chapter Coverage Confirmation
| Chapter | New load-bearing vocabulary/doctrine content | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Jonah 1 | Prophetic commissioning formula (قم، اذهب / كلمة الرب); flight vocabulary (نزل; من أمام وجه الرب); Sovereignty over Creation (storm, casting lots, great fish); Gentile sailors’ proto-conversion (Elohim→YHWH shift, sacrifice and vows) | Reviewed — contributes new terms |
| Jonah 2 | Resurrection-typology vocabulary (Sheol/the pit; three days and three nights; “salvation belongs to the LORD”); poetic death-and-return language | Reviewed — contributes new terms, core to Doctrine 5 |
| Jonah 3 (core passage) | Repentance and Divine Mercy vocabulary in full (proclaim; forty days; overthrown; believed/faith; fast; sackcloth; ashes; violence; turn/repent human; relent divine; evil/calamity dual sense); anchors Doctrines 1 and 2 | Reviewed — theological anchor of the curriculum |
| Jonah 4 | Compassion for the Nations climax (gracious/compassionate formula, lovingkindness, slow to anger); Human Reluctance vocabulary (anger; pity/compassion; the plant/worm/east wind sovereignty pattern); closing rhetorical question | Reviewed — contributes new terms, anchors Doctrines 1, 3, and 4 |
No chapter in Jonah contributes zero new load-bearing content; all four are represented in the analysis above and in the accompanying core glossary.
6. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities
Ranked by combined doctrinal severity and likelihood of silent misreading, for priority routing in Phase 2/3 review.
-
שׁוּב vs. נִחַם vs. Islamic tawba/qadar (Jonah 3:8-10, 4:2) — Critical. The single highest risk in this book: two distinct Hebrew verbs (human turning, divine relenting) sit directly beside two distinct, well-developed, and easily-conflated Islamic categories (tawba as self-secured forgiveness; qadar as fixed decree that change-language would seem to violate). Requires the two-tier lexical fencing strategy in §2.2/§4 and mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence.
-
“Sign of Jonah” / three days and three nights / great fish, as resurrection typology (Jonah 1:17–2:10; cross-referenced to Matthew 12:39-41) — Critical. The entire curriculum doctrine “Jonah as a Sign Foreshadowing Christ’s Resurrection” depends on (a) exact durational vocabulary matching Matthew’s Arabic text, (b) consistent great-fish vocabulary across both testaments, and (c) mandatory prior apologetic scaffolding establishing the historicity of the crucifixion (per the baseline’s own resurrection-doctrine note), since Quran 4:157 removes the event the typology assumes.
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Nineveh’s believing/faith response (Jonah 3:5) read through Islamic iman — High. Reuses the baseline’s already-flagged faith/الإيمان risk, but here the stakes are doctrinally amplified: this is a Gentile city with no covenant, law, or prior revelation responding immediately and totally — the strongest OT anticipation of Gentile inclusion apart from works available before the NT itself. A reading that collapses this into creedal-assent-plus-practice would blunt the doctrine’s forward-pointing force toward Romans.
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Compassion/mercy vocabulary (חַנּוּן וְרַחוּם, Jonah 4:2) mistaken for shared theological ground rather than a specific, scandalous claim — High. Because the Arabic words genuinely and positively overlap with Allah’s own most-repeated names, there is real risk that readers affirm the vocabulary while missing the doctrine’s actual argument: this mercy is extended effectively to a violent, unrepentant-until-now Gentile enemy with zero covenant claim. Vocabulary agreement must not be mistaken for doctrinal agreement.
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Nineveh as contemporary political signifier (all chapters, especially 1:2, 3:1-10, 4:11) — High. Modern Nineveh province’s association with ISIS-era sectarian violence and persecution of religious minorities (2014-2017) is a live, non-ancient association for many Arabic-speaking readers. Teaching on “Compassion for the Nations” using this text risks being heard as a statement about present-day events rather than the ancient narrative, unless framed deliberately — directly analogous to the baseline’s “Israel” political-sensitivity caution.
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Divine name alternation (YHWH → الرب vs. Elohim → الله) tracked inconsistently across four chapters — Medium-High. Not a doctrinal collision risk in the way #1-5 are, but a narrative-signal-loss risk: if translators fail to track which Hebrew name underlies each occurrence, the meaningful movement from pagan generic theism (1:5, “each to his own god”) to explicit naming of YHWH (1:16; 3’s Elohim-directed response is itself notable) becomes invisible, weakening the “Compassion for the Nations” and “Universal Love” doctrines’ textual support.
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רָעָה’s dual sense (moral evil / calamity) lost in Jonah 3:10 — Medium-High. The verse’s rhetorical logic (God relents of the [calamity] because they turned from the [evil]) depends on a wordplay Arabic cannot reproduce in one term; without an explicit teaching note, the connection between Nineveh’s moral turning and God’s disposition-change reads as two separate facts rather than the single unified move the Hebrew text presents.
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חָמָס (violence, 3:8) and phonetic proximity to a contemporary political name — Medium. Not a doctrinal risk at all, but a real practical rendering risk requiring native-speaker proofreading pass to ensure no unintended visual/phonetic association survives into final typeset or spoken-audio materials.
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פ fasting vocabulary (צוֹם, 3:5) read as Ramadan-equivalent religious observance — Medium. Risk of the doctrine of urgent, spontaneous, city-wide contrition being flattened into “Nineveh performed a religious obligation,” missing that the fast here is an unscheduled emergency response to a specific revealed warning.
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חוּס closing rhetorical question (4:10-11) resolved into a flat statement — Medium. Lower doctrinal-collision risk than items above, but a real literary/rhetorical-force risk: over-resolving the book’s open, convicting final question into a declarative summary would undercut the pedagogical power the book’s own ending is designed to have on the reader (mirroring Jonah’s, and the reader’s own, resistance to God’s universal compassion).
7. Summary of Recommended Actions for Phase 2 Preparation
- Adopt the two-tier repentance vocabulary strategy (يرجع / التوبة) as a binding rule, not a stylistic option, before any segment translation begins.
- Add all “New” terms from the accompanying core glossary and bible_term_registry.json Jonah entries to a Jonah-specific translation_memory.json, following the exact baseline schema, before Phase 2 begins.
- Flag every occurrence of doctrines #1 (resurrection typology) and #2 (repentance/divine mercy) for mandatory human theologian review, consistent with the baseline’s Critical-risk review routing.
- Add a standing teaching-note requirement (not a translation-text requirement) for: the רָעָה wordplay loss (3:10), the נֶהְפָּכֶת irony (3:4), and the contemporary political weight of Nineveh — these are pedagogical scaffolding needs the translated verse text itself cannot carry alone.
- Confirm with native-speaker review that all final renderings of חָמָס avoid any spelling proximate to حماس before batch publication.
This document extends, and does not contradict, the baseline Romans Language Package (translation_memory.json, bible_term_registry.json, doctrine_risk_registry.json, 12_ai_translation_requirements.md). All baseline term renderings referenced above are reused exactly as recorded there.