Linguistic Gap Analysis
Linguistic Gap Analysis: Micah — English → Arabic
Purpose and Method
This analysis identifies where Modern Standard Arabic (Christian register, Van Dyck/NAV tradition) has no clean lexical equivalent for a Micah doctrine-term (a gap), and where it has too many competing, doctrinally-loaded equivalents (a crowded neighborhood). It extends the baseline Romans translation_memory.json and bible_term_registry.json — every term already fixed there is reused exactly and not re-analyzed here except where Micah’s context changes its risk profile (noted explicitly). This document is the working paper behind 08_core_glossary.md; where the two differ in wording, 08_core_glossary.md and bible_term_registry.json are authoritative, and this file records the reasoning that produced them.
Coverage: all seven chapters of Micah. Chapters or verses contributing no new gap beyond material already covered by the Romans baseline are noted as reviewed, not silently skipped.
Part 1 — Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
For each of the curriculum’s five doctrines, this matrix lists the available Arabic candidate term(s), their specific weaknesses in Micah’s context, and the recommended strategy.
1.1 True Worship versus Empty Ritual
| Available Arabic term(s) | Hebrew source | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| العبادة (worship/ritual service, generic) | (framing category, not one lexeme) | Islam’s own foundational organizing term (al-‘ibadah = the whole of ritual-legal service to Allah, esp. the five pillars). Using it unqualified for Micah’s critique risks readers hearing an attack on ritual practice as such rather than on ritual severed from justice/mercy/humility. | Do not use as a headline gloss without an explicit teaching note (carried forward as a cross-cutting flag in 11_doctrine_analysis.md). Always pair with the corrective content of 6:8, never left standing alone. |
| بماذا أتقدم (come before the LORD, 6:6) | בַּמָּה אֲקַדֵּם | Reads, if left unqualified, as a legitimate liturgical question rather than the rhetorically rejected premise of the unit. | Paraphrase retained as a rhetorical question the passage answers negatively; teaching note required, not vocabulary substitution. |
| أنحني / أسجد (bow down/prostrate, 6:6) | אֶכַּף | أسجد shares root س-ج-د with sujūd, the defining posture of Islamic ṣalāh. | Use أنحني as primary (bodily bowing, broader than the ritual-specific أسجد); if أسجد is used for poetic parallelism, it must carry an explicit note that correct posture apart from justice/mercy/humility is declared insufficient — not an endorsement of the posture as sufficient worship. |
| المحرقة (burnt offering, 6:6) | עוֹלָה | No exact modern referent; risk of conflation with qurbān/dhabīḥah (Eid al-Adha sacrifice), which is commemorative, not atoning in the OT sacrificial-substitution sense. | Retain المحرقة as an OT technical term; require a first-use gloss plus forward link to Christ’s sacrifice so it is not left as a self-sufficient ritual answer. |
| المرتفعات (high places, 1:5) | בָּמוֹת | No cultural referent at all in the Arab-Muslim context; term will read as opaque without explanation. | Retain literal rendering + mandatory explanatory footnote (illicit hilltop worship sites, sometimes syncretistic). |
| الأصنام (idols, 1:7; 5:13) | פְּסִילִים / עֲצַבִּים | Genuinely low-risk shared vocabulary (Qur’anic Abraham narratives condemn idolatry) — the risk is under-specification, not collision. | Use as a bridge term but always supply the concrete historical referents (Baal, Asherah, calf-worship) so the term is not left as a vague catch-all. |
Gap identified: Arabic has no single word that carries Micah 6:6-8’s specific rhetorical move — ritually correct but relationally empty. This must be built through the surrounding sentence structure (question → escalation → correction) rather than through a single lexical choice.
1.2 Justice, Mercy, and Humility (core doctrine, Micah 6:8)
| Available Arabic term(s) | Hebrew source | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| العدل (justice) | מִשְׁפָּט (mishpat) | Direct cognate-adjacent to Al-‘Adl, one of the 99 names of Allah, and a major fiqh/theology category (typically heard as impartial legal correctness). Mishpat in Micah is restorative: defending the powerless, correcting exploiting rulers (ch. 2-3) — active vindication, not passive fairness. | Reuse العدل (Van Dyck convention), but every occurrence in teaching material must gloss the restorative-communal sense against the courtroom-impartiality default. الحق remains an acceptable secondary variant; الحكم alone is rejected (narrows to “verdict”). |
| الرحمة (mercy/lovingkindness) | חֶסֶד (chesed) | Direct cognate with Ar-Raḥmān/Ar-Raḥīm — heard as sovereign, discretionary divine favor, not covenant loyalty commanded of humans toward one another. | Reuse الرحمة for chesed only (established Van Dyck rendering); reserve a different Arabic term (see 1.4 below) for rachamim so the two distinct Hebrew roots are not collapsed into one collision-prone Arabic word. |
| التواضع (humility) | הַצְנֵעַ לֶכֶת (hatsnea lechet) | Tawāḍuʿ is a genuine, positively-regarded Islamic virtue (overlap is real), but “walk humbly” is a lifelong relational accompaniment (“with your God”), not a static virtue-trait, and risks being read through Sufi fanā’ (self-annihilation before God). | Render as a verbal phrase (السلوك بتواضع مع إلهك), never a bare noun/attribute, to keep the relational “walking with” sense and block the mystical-dissolution reading. |
Gap identified: none of the three Arabic terms is a false friend in isolation, but Arabic’s available vocabulary for this triad clusters unusually tightly around Allah’s own names and Islamic virtue categories simultaneously — a compounding risk unique to this verse (see Part 4, ranked #2).
1.3 The Coming Ruler from Bethlehem
| Available Arabic term(s) | Hebrew source | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| بيت لحم أفراتة (Bethlehem Ephrathah) | בֵּית־לֶחֶם אֶפְרָתָה | No weakness in the Arabic form itself; the risk is readers treating the fulfillment (Matthew 2:6) as a generic literary type rather than a specific, falsifiable historical claim. | Transliterate the double place-name in full (city + clan-district qualifier); teaching material must state the Matthew 2:6 citation explicitly as literal fulfillment, not typological echo. |
| المتسلط / الحاكم (ruler) | מוֹשֵׁל (moshel) | الحاكم is the more neutral, secular-administrative choice (also used for modern political rulers, judges, governors); المتسلط carries a “dominating/exercising power” nuance closer to mishpat’s active governance. Neither alone signals messianic weight the way المسيح or الرب does. | Use الحاكم as primary gloss but require the term always to appear in direct textual proximity to the Bethlehem/David/“from everlasting” cluster so readers connect it to the baseline’s Critical “messiah”/“lord” entries rather than reading a merely political appointment. |
| منذ القدم، منذ أيام الأزل (from everlasting) | מִקֶּדֶם מִימֵי עוֹלָם | Arabic has no single word carrying both “from ancient historical time” and “from eternity” simultaneously; a plain historical reading (“a long time ago”) would flatten the preexistence claim the doctrine needs. | Retain the doubled phrase (منذ القدم + منذ أيام الأزل/الأبدية) precisely because the redundancy in the Hebrew itself is doing theological work; do not compress to a single adverb. |
| الراعي (shepherd) | רָעָה (ra’ah) | Broadly safe, positive overlap (also present in hadith leadership metaphor), but risks staying generic if not tied forward. | Retain الراعي; require explicit forward link to Christ’s “Good Shepherd” self-designation (John 10) in teaching notes so the metaphor is not left free-floating. |
| داود (David) | דָּוִד | Shared, positively-regarded Qur’anic prophet-king, but the Qur’anic Dawud carries no covenant-king/messianic-heir typology. | Reuse داود exactly (baseline); supply the missing typological background explicitly rather than assuming it transfers. |
Gap identified: Arabic lacks a title that does double duty as (a) a plausible historical “ruler/governor” term and (b) an unmistakable messianic marker; the doctrinal weight in 5:2 must therefore be carried contextually (co-occurrence with Bethlehem + David + “from everlasting”), not by a single word choice.
1.4 Judgment on Corrupt Leaders
| Available Arabic term(s) | Hebrew source | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| الرؤساء / القضاة (rulers/judges) | רָאשִׁים / שֹׁפְטִים | Neutral administrative vocabulary; low independent collision, but must not be flattened into a single generic word losing the “those who should render mishpat but instead devour the people” indictment. | Retain the pair distinctly (رؤساء for tribal/political heads, قضاة for judicial officeholders) matching the Hebrew’s own distinction. |
| نبي (prophet) — true vs. false | נָבִיא (navi) | Reused from baseline (Low risk there), but Micah 3 makes true-vs-false prophetic authority itself the load-bearing argument (money-driven prophets vs. Spirit-empowered Micah). This structural centrality — not the word itself — elevates collision risk with khatam an-nabiyyin (“seal of the prophets”) logic, under which readers may reflexively treat any prophetic office as provisional pending Muhammad’s final revelation. | Escalate risk from Low (Romans baseline) to High for Micah. Require an explicit note distinguishing the criterion for true prophetic authority in Micah 3 (Spirit-empowerment + moral content, not novelty or finality) from the Islamic finality claim. |
| روح الرب (Spirit of the LORD) | רוּחַ יְהוָה | Identical collision pattern to the baseline’s الروح القدس entry: mainstream tafsir identifies “the holy spirit” of Qur’an 2:87/2:253 with the created angel Jibril. | Teach 3:8 as the OT root pointing toward, not identical in wording to, the fuller NT revelation of the Spirit as a co-equal divine Person — continuity of referent, not verbal identity, is the claim. |
| يتكهنون بالفضة / العرافة (divination for money) | קָסַם / נִחֵשׁ (בְּכֶסֶף) | Low collision; kihānah (soothsaying-for-hire) is condemned in Islamic tradition too (hadith against consulting kāhins). | Use as a genuine bridge; no fencing required. |
| الويل (woe) | הוֹי | Low collision; Qur’anic wayl oracles (e.g. Surah al-Muṭaffifīn) use an equivalent rhetorical form against social injustice. | Usable rhetorical bridge; retain literal rendering. |
Gap identified: none purely lexical; the risk here is structural/contextual (prophetic-authority argument) rather than a missing or crowded word.
1.5 Hope of Restoration and Forgiveness
| Available Arabic term(s) | Hebrew source | Weakness | Recommended strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| البقية (remnant) | שְׁאֵרִית (she’erit) | No lexical weakness; doctrinal risk is readers hearing “statistical survivors” rather than God’s sovereign preserving purpose. | Reuse البقية; connect explicitly to the baseline’s High-risk “election” doctrine (Romans 11:5) and guard against folk qadar fatalism per the baseline’s existing caution. |
| يفدي / الفادي (redeem) | גָּאַל (ga’al) | Arabic has no single word carrying the specific kinsman-redeemer background (a family member’s legal-covenantal obligation to buy back land/persons/relatives). | Retain يفدي/الفادي but require the kinsman-redeemer background to be taught explicitly as the conceptual root of Christ’s redemptive work — the term alone under-delivers this. |
| صهيون / بنت صهيون (Zion/Daughter of Zion) | צִיּוֹן / בַּת־צִיּוֹן | Heavy, largely negative contemporary political freight (“Zionism”) entirely disconnected from the OT theological sense. | Retain transliteration (no viable substitute exists) but require explicit covenantal/theological framing at every occurrence; never left to stand as an implicit endorsement or critique of a modern political movement. |
| الأيام الأخيرة (latter days) | אַחֲרִית הַיָּמִים | Islamic eschatology (ākhir al-zamān: Mahdi, Dajjal, a subordinate ‘Isa) is a fully developed, competing narrative that will fill any generic use of this phrase by default. | Anchor every occurrence to Micah’s specific content (Torah/word from Zion, swords to plowshares, nations worshipping the one true God through the Messiah); never leave as an unfilled placeholder. |
| جبل بيت الرب (mountain of the house of the LORD) | הַר בֵּית־יהוה | Same phrase used for both judgment (3:12, desolate) and hope (4:1, exalted) — a rhetorical device easily lost in translation if rendered inconsistently between the two verses; also acute contemporary Jerusalem/Al-Aqsa/Temple Mount sensitivity. | Render identically in both verses to preserve the judgment→reversal rhetorical structure; require explicit separation of the 8th-c. BC referent from present-day territorial claims, per the same convention as “Israel.” |
| يصفح عن الإثم / يتجاوز عن التعدي (pardon iniquity / pass over transgression) | נָשָׂא עָוֹן / עָבַר עַל־פֶּשַׁע | Islamic ghafara is sovereign, unilateral, contingent forgiveness explicitly without substitutionary basis (Qur’an 6:164 denies bearing another’s sin). No single Arabic verb captures “forensic, substitutionary removal of guilt already secured,” so the concept must be carried by teaching notes, not the verb alone. | Retain compound phrase; mandatory note anticipating Christ’s substitutionary, once-for-all forgiveness, explicitly contrasted with a deeds-weighing-pending-Judgment-Day framing. |
| الرأفة / الحنان (compassion, rachamim) | רַחֲמִים | Exact Semitic cognate of ر-ح-م, the root of Ar-Raḥmān/Ar-Raḥīm — if rendered as الرحمة (as chesed already is), the distinction between the two Hebrew roots collapses and doubles the collision surface. | Do not reuse الرحمة for rachamim. Use الرأفة/الحنان specifically, preserving the Hebrew text’s own two-root distinction and reducing the collision to one word instead of two. |
| يطرح خطاياهم في أعماق البحر (cast sins into the sea) | וְתַשְׁלִיךְ בִּמְצֻלוֹת יָם | No lexical weakness; risk is theological softening into partial/provisional forgiveness. | Preserve completeness/finality of the image explicitly; connects to baseline’s Critical “Assurance of Salvation” doctrine. |
| مَن مثلك (يا الله) (who is like you) | מִי־כָמֹכָה | The Hebrew name-pun on “Micah” (Mikhah) is untranslatable; a bare rendering loses the rhetorical device entirely. | Footnote required at first occurrence explaining the name-pun; treat as a genuine tawḥīd-adjacent bridge but anchor the content specifically to God’s uniquely forgiving character (7:18-19), not a generic monotheistic slogan. |
Part 2 — Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods
2.1 Missing Vocabulary (no clean one-word Arabic equivalent exists)
| Concept | Gap description | Resolution strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Mishpat’s restorative sense | العدل defaults to legal-impartiality; no single word conveys “active vindication of the wronged” without added context. | Always co-teach with concrete referents (ch. 2-3’s field-seizing, corrupt judges) rather than relying on the noun alone. |
| Chesed vs. rachamim distinction | Arabic’s compassion/mercy vocabulary (الرحمة, الرأفة, الحنان) does not map 1:1 onto Hebrew’s two distinct roots. | Fence chesed to الرحمة exclusively; fence rachamim to الرأفة/الحنان exclusively (see 2.2 below); never let the two swap. |
| Pesha vs. chatta’ah distinction | Arabic has near-synonyms (الخطية, التعدي, المعصية) but no pair with the same willful-rebellion-vs-general-failure contrast built in. | Fence chatta’ah to الخطية (reused from baseline) and pesha to التعدي/المعصية consistently; never conflate. |
| Hatsnea lechet’s “deliberate, careful, ongoing” nuance | التواضع alone is a static trait-noun; the Hebrew is a verbal infinitive construction describing a manner of walking. | Always render as a verbal phrase (السلوك بتواضع), not a bare noun. |
| Bamot (high places) | No cultural referent exists in the target culture at all — a true vocabulary gap, not a collision. | Literal rendering + mandatory first-use footnote. |
| Ha-porets (“the Breaker,” 2:13) | Ambiguous figure in the Hebrew itself (divine? royal/messianic? both?); Arabic offers candidate renderings (الكاسر / فارع الطريق) but none resolves the ambiguity — nor should it. | Preserve the ambiguity; teaching notes must present interpretive options rather than asserting a firm messianic identification the text does not clearly support. |
| Acharit ha-yamim (“latter days”) without importing a foreign framework | Arabic has the phrase الأيام الأخيرة but no way to prevent it defaulting to the fully-formed Islamic ākhir al-zamān narrative. | Content-anchor every occurrence (see 1.5 above); never use as an unfilled placeholder. |
| Mi-khamokhah name-pun (7:18) | Untranslatable wordplay; no Arabic equivalent can reproduce the Hebrew’s pun on “Micah.” | Footnote-only strategy; do not attempt a clever Arabic pun substitute, which would risk inventing new theological connotations. |
2.2 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing
| Arabic term | Competing Islamic association | Fencing rule |
|---|---|---|
| العدل | Al-‘Adl (divine name); classical fiqh justice | Fence to Micah’s restorative-communal sense; never let it collapse to courtroom impartiality alone. |
| الرحمة | Ar-Raḥmān / Ar-Raḥīm (divine names) | Fence exclusively to chesed (covenant loyalty); never also use for rachamim. |
| الرأفة / الحنان | Same ر-ح-م root as Ar-Raḥmān/Ar-Raḥīm | Fence exclusively to rachamim; keep distinct from الرحمة even though both derive from the same triliteral root family in Arabic. |
| التواضع | Sufi fanā’ (self-annihilation) | Fence to relational “walking with” (accompaniment), never mystical dissolution of self. |
| أسجد / السجود | Salah’s defining sujūd posture | Fence to a rejected-premise reading (bodily posture insufficient apart from 6:8’s content), never an endorsement of the posture itself. |
| العبادة | Islam’s foundational organizing category (the five pillars, ritual-legal service) | Never used unqualified as the headline term for “true worship”; always paired with the 6:8 corrective content. |
| الشريعة / الشرع (rejected) | The total Islamic religious-legal-political system | Never used for torah/nomos (reuse الناموس exactly, per baseline). |
| القدس (rejected) | Modern political/religious name for Jerusalem | Never used for biblical Jerusalem; reuse أورشليم exclusively, per baseline “Israel” convention. |
| صهيون | Modern political “Zionism” | Retain transliteration but require explicit covenantal-theological framing at every occurrence. |
| روح الرب / الروح القدس | Jibril (Gabriel) identification in mainstream tafsir | Fence to a divine-Person reading, taught as continuous with, not verbally identical to, later NT revelation. |
| نبي | Khatam an-nabiyyin (seal of the prophets) | Elevated to High risk in Micah specifically because ch. 3’s true-vs-false-prophet argument makes prophetic authority itself load-bearing; fence to Spirit-empowerment + moral content as the criterion. |
| الأمة (avoided) | Pan-Islamic community of Muslims | Never borrowed for “God’s people” or “remnant”; use البقية / الكنيسة (baseline) instead. |
Part 3 — Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Item | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| بيت لحم أفراتة (Bethlehem Ephrathah) | Transliterate in full (city + district qualifier) | Preserves the specific historical/genealogical marker Matthew 2:6 depends on; no paraphrase can substitute for the proper noun. |
| داود / إبراهيم / إسرائيل / يعقوب / أورشليم | Transliterate, established Christian Arabic Bible forms (reused from baseline exactly) | Consistency with the Romans baseline and with historic Van Dyck/NAV convention; no viable alternative exists. |
| صهيون | Transliterate, with mandatory framing footnote | No paraphrase adequately substitutes for “Zion” as a proper noun/personification; the risk is contextual, not lexical, so it is managed by teaching notes, not a different word. |
| عمري / أخآب (Omri / Ahab) | Transliterate historical proper names | Low risk; reinforces the “Judgment on Corrupt Leaders” doctrine with concrete historical specificity. |
| רָאשִׁים / שֹׁפְטִים (rulers/judges) | Paraphrase with a distinct term-pair (الرؤساء / القضاة) rather than one collapsed word | Preserves the Hebrew’s own two-role distinction (political heads vs. judicial officeholders). |
| מִקֶּדֶם מִימֵי עוֹלָם (from everlasting) | Paraphrase as a doubled compound phrase (منذ القدم، منذ أيام الأزل/الأبدية) | No single Arabic word carries both “ancient historical” and “eternal” senses simultaneously; the redundancy is theologically load-bearing and must be preserved, not compressed. |
| נָשָׂא עָוֹן / עָבַר עַל־פֶּשַׁע (pardon iniquity / pass over transgression) | Paraphrase as a compound verbal phrase, never a single verb | A single Arabic verb (e.g., غفر) would collapse this into the Islamic ghafara framework; the compound preserves the forensic “lift and remove” sense pending the mandatory teaching note. |
| מִי־כָמֹכָה (name-pun) | Paraphrase (مَن مثلك) + mandatory footnote; do not attempt a matching Arabic pun | Inventing a new Arabic wordplay risks introducing unintended theological connotations not present in the source. |
| חָזוֹן (vision) | Single-word transliteration-adjacent gloss (رؤيا), not paraphrased | Established, low-risk OT prophetic vocabulary; paraphrase is unnecessary and would add bulk without reducing risk. |
| רוּחַ יְהוָה (Spirit of the LORD) | Literal compound (روح الرب), not transliterated, not paraphrased loosely | Must remain visibly parallel to الروح القدس so the OT-to-NT continuity argument is teachable; a looser paraphrase would obscure that link. |
| הַפֹּרֵץ (the Breaker) | Literal descriptive rendering (الكاسر / فارع الطريق), deliberately not resolved into a title | Preserves the source text’s own ambiguity rather than resolving it through translation choice. |
General rule derived: transliterate proper nouns and established Van Dyck/NAV vocabulary; paraphrase (rather than force a single Arabic word) wherever the Hebrew concept spans a semantic range no single Arabic lexeme covers, especially where a single-word choice would either (a) collapse two distinct Hebrew roots into one collision-prone Arabic word, or (b) accidentally import a competing Islamic theological framework by defaulting to its own established vocabulary.
Part 4 — Ranked List of Micah’s Highest-Risk Ambiguities
Ranked by combined doctrinal severity (per doctrine_risk_registry.json-style tiers) and collision likelihood (how directly the available Arabic vocabulary is already claimed by competing Islamic theological usage):
- Bethlehem Ephrathah + “from everlasting” (5:2) — Critical. The single most direct verbal bridge to Messiah/Incarnation/Sonship doctrine in the whole book; risk of flattening preexistence into mere ancient-historical distance, or of treating the fulfillment as generic typology rather than literal, falsifiable prophecy.
- The Justice/Mercy/Humility triad (6:8) — High/Critical compound. Three Arabic terms (العدل, الرحمة, التواضع) simultaneously collide with two divine names and one major virtue-category in the same verse — the highest density of competing associations anywhere in the book, occurring in the curriculum’s core passage.
- Pardon iniquity / compassion (rachamim) (7:18-19) — Critical. Direct collision with Islamic ghafara’s contingent, non-substitutionary forgiveness and with the ر-ح-م root of Allah’s own names; the book’s climactic confession is also its highest doctrinal-collision point.
- Ruler (moshel) title (5:2) — Critical. No Arabic word carries both plausible-historical-governor and unmistakable-messianic-title senses at once; risk of the title being read as merely political.
- Zion / Mountain of the house of the LORD (3:12; 4:1; 4:8,10) — High. Acute, currently live contemporary political freight (Zionism, Jerusalem, Al-Aqsa/Temple Mount) entirely absent from the 8th-century-BC referent; repeated four times across the book, compounding exposure.
- Latter days (4:1) — High. A fully-developed competing Islamic eschatological narrative will fill this phrase by default unless every occurrence is content-anchored.
- Spirit of the LORD (3:8) — Critical. Identical collision pattern to the baseline’s Holy Spirit entry (Jibril identification in mainstream tafsir), occurring at the pivotal moment Micah’s own prophetic authority is asserted.
- Bow down prostrate (6:6) — High. Root-level collision with ṣalāh’s sujūd; must be taught as a rejected premise, not an endorsed posture, in the same breath the word appears.
- Firstborn / sacrificial escalation (6:7) — High. Risk of readers inferring the Bible once endorsed child sacrifice, or conflating this with Genesis 22/Qur’an 37’s substitution narratives, if the historical Molech-worship referent is not made explicit.
- Justice (mishpat) as a standalone term (throughout, esp. ch. 2-3, 6:8) — High. Persistent risk of readers hearing Al-‘Adl-style legal impartiality rather than Micah’s restorative, others-defending sense; recurs across more verses than any other single term in this list.
- True vs. false prophet argument (ch. 3) — High (elevated from the Romans baseline’s Low). Structural, not lexical: the chapter’s entire argument about legitimate prophetic authority risks being absorbed into khatam an-nabiyyin logic if not explicitly fenced.
- The Breaker (2:13) — Medium-High. Genuine textual ambiguity; the risk is translator/teacher over-resolution (asserting a firm messianic identification) rather than a vocabulary collision as such.
Coverage confirmation: all seven chapters of Micah are represented in the analysis above (chs. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7); no chapter was silently omitted. Chapters contributing primarily reused-baseline vocabulary (e.g., historical/proper-noun material in ch. 1 beyond “high places,” or the woe/oppression vocabulary in ch. 2 beyond “the Breaker” and “inheritance”) were reviewed and found to introduce no additional gap beyond what is already documented in Part 1 and Part 2 above.