Executive Summary — Amos Language Package (English → english)

Why it matters

Amos is being prepared as a full-book English-language Bible study curriculum anchored on Amos 5:18-24 (“Let justice roll down like waters”). Because source and destination language are both English, the translation risk isn’t cross-language — it’s drift within contemporary English itself: secular false-friends, denominational disagreement, obsolete vocabulary, and a category specific to this Old Testament prophetic book, homophone/near-homograph collision (most acutely, “the day of the LORD” colliding with “the Lord’s Day,” and “Nazirite” colliding with “Nazarene”). Left unmanaged, these risks would let readers confidently misread the very passages the curriculum is built to teach.

Key findings

• 56 total terms now tracked in assets/translation_memory.json: 16 inherited exactly from the baseline Romans package (Lord, Israel, righteousness, sin, prophet, prophecy, covenant, election, called, calling, David, seed of David, holy, Gentiles, God, Son of God) and 40 new Amos-specific terms covering all nine chapters.
• 15 doctrines identified and risk-tiered in doctrine_risk_registry.json, spanning the curriculum’s five assigned doctrines plus ten supporting doctrines surfaced by full-book coverage (e.g., Divine Election and Accountability, Covenant Curses and Discipline, Divine Responsiveness to Intercession).
• The book’s own core passage (5:18-24) is a doctrinal convergence point: it houses the single highest-priority term risk in the whole curriculum (“the day of the LORD”) immediately alongside the Judgment-on-Ritual and Social-Justice anchor material.
• Every chapter of Amos (1-9) contributed at least one load-bearing term or doctrine; none was silently skipped (confirmed in 11_doctrine_analysis.md and 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md).

Risks

• 6 Critical-risk terms: “the day of the LORD,” LORD/Lord (YHWH/Adonai typographic distinction), “Nazirite,” “the fallen tent of David,” plus inherited “Lord” and “election.” Each produces confident misreading, not merely a comprehension gap, and requires mandatory human theologian review on every occurrence.
• 12 High-risk terms (7 new + 5 inherited: justice, poor/needy, “I hate, I despise,” known/chosen, relent, seek, covenant curses, plus inherited righteousness, sin, covenant, called, calling) — significant secular dilution or live denominational disagreement.
• 4 Critical doctrines and 6 High doctrines — 10 of 15 total doctrines require human theologian review; the remaining 5 Medium-risk doctrines require native-speaker review; zero doctrines are automated-only.
• Three risks carry outsized doctrinal stakes: (1) “the day of the LORD” vs. “the Lord’s Day” — an aural/visual collision with the opposite implication of Amos’s meaning; (2) “the fallen tent of David” (9:11-15) — trivialized by camping imagery, contested already/not-yet across English-speaking Christian traditions, and the direct Old Testament root of the baseline’s Critical Christological entries (Acts 15:16-17); (3) contemporary non-judgmental culture’s resistance to Amos’s universal-accountability and hollow-ritual-revulsion language (1:3-2:16; 5:21; 6:8), which pressures toward silent softening the doctrinal-preservation rules forbid.

Opportunities

• Amos’s justice and poverty material (mishpat/tsedaqah, 5:24) resonates strongly, and largely positively, with contemporary equality/anti-corruption discourse — an asset, provided the curriculum explicitly brackets Amos’s own prior vocabulary against contemporary partisan “social justice” coding rather than ceding the term to either side.
• “False scales” (8:4-6) and the covenant-curse-as-communication frame (4:6-11) translate intuitively into recognizable modern images (consumer fraud; deliberate warning) once briefly glossed, requiring less active correction than most Critical/High terms.
• Building the LORD/Lord distinction and “the day of the LORD” disambiguation into every document now (Step 10) creates a reusable enforcement pattern the pipeline can apply to every other prophetic-book curriculum sharing this fourth risk category.

Recommended actions

1. Enforce the no-silent-pass-through list for “the day of the LORD,” LORD/Lord, “Nazirite,” and “the fallen tent of David” identically in every Phase 2 document, per 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
2. Route all Amos 5:18-24 core-passage content, and all chs. 1-2/3:2 universal-accountability content, through mandatory human theologian review before publication.
3. State the curriculum’s own already/not-yet fulfillment position on “the fallen tent of David” transparently in the first document that introduces it, with explicit acknowledgment of the range of other English-speaking Christian readings, and hold that position consistent across all subsequent documents.
4. Carry the qayits/qets (8:1-2) untranslatable-wordplay editorial-note requirement and the Damascus/Gaza/Tyre/Edom/Ammon/Moab/Bethel/Gilgal background-supply requirement into every Phase 2 content pass touching those passages, since both are binary risks (either supplied and the passage lands, or omitted and it doesn’t).