Executive Summary: 2 Kings (French)

Why it matters: 2 Kings 17:1-23 — the fall of the Northern Kingdom — is the theological hinge of a book that spans 25 chapters of covenant history, from Elijah’s fire on Carmel to Jerusalem’s ashes and Jehoiachin’s release. A French-language Phase 1 package for this curriculum must carry a Hebrew-narrative vocabulary the Romans baseline never had to solve: the covenant name YHWH, an idolatry catalog, OT priesthood, and a euphemism for child sacrifice — each colliding with live French religious sensitivities (Catholic sacramental categories, Huguenot exile memory, France’s Jewish community, and a normalized secular “voyance” culture) that did not arise in Romans.

Key findings:

• One governing new decision anchors the whole book: YHWH → “le SEIGNEUR” (small capitals), reusing the baseline’s “Seigneur” root but typographically fenced from both the NT Christological title and Segond’s “l’Éternel” / Bible de Jérusalem’s “Yahvé” — required at every occurrence across all 25 chapters, not sampled.
• The full-book term registry adds 60 new theological terms to the 16 terms inherited exactly from the Romans baseline (76 total in translation_memory.json), spanning prophetic office vocabulary, the idolatry catalog, covenant-lawsuit language, and Josiah’s reform vocabulary.
• The doctrine matrix decomposes the six curriculum doctrines into 30 total doctrines: 6 Critical, 15 High, 7 Medium, 2 Low — identical tier counts across doctrine_risk_registry.json and 11_doctrine_analysis.md, confirming internal consistency.
• At the term level, 7 Critical-risk terms (le SEIGNEUR, exil/exiler, écarter…de devant sa face, faire passer par le feu, sacrificateur, oindre/onction vs. Messie boundary, the Josiah 23:25/26-27 tension) and 26 High-risk terms — 33 Critical+High terms in total — require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence.
• Chapter 17 (the core passage) uniquely concentrates nearly every Critical and most High-risk doctrine in the book, confirming its status as both theological anchor and highest-density review-load chapter; chapters 21 and 22-23 are the next-highest concentration points.
• Full-book coverage is confirmed: all 25 chapters reviewed with no silent omissions; chapters 7 and 20 explicitly noted as contributing no new lexical terms while still reinforcing established vocabulary.

Risks:

• Exile softening (“déplacement/migration” for galah) would strip the curriculum’s namesake doctrine of its judicial force — the single highest-stakes rendering risk identified.
• Child sacrifice euphemism mishandling (“faire passer par le feu,” 16:3/17:17/21:6) in either direction — too literal (losing the text’s own restraint) or too soft (reading as purification) — is Critical and requires a mandatory gloss at every occurrence.
• Priesthood (“prêtre”) and royal anointing (“Messie”) collisions risk importing, respectively, modern Catholic sacramental-clergy categories and the baseline’s reserved eschatological Messianic title onto ordinary OT offices.
• “Voyant” drift: French Bible tradition’s only available word for the distinct Hebrew office chozeh (“seer”) is the same word used for contemporary fortune-tellers; unpaired use anywhere would reintroduce exactly the risk the Romans baseline already rejected for “prophet.”
• The Josiah tension (23:25 vs. 23:26-27) and the Hope-amid-Judgment remnant notes (17:18; 25:27-30) are easily flattened by smooth narrative prose into either a moralistic or fatalistic — or triumphalist or despairing — resolution the Hebrew text itself withholds.
• France-specific sensitivities: exile vocabulary intersects live Huguenot-exile and Jewish-galut memory; “réforme(s) de Josias” risks misreading as a coded reference to the French Protestant Reformation; occult-practice vocabulary (21:6) intersects a normalized secular “voyance” commercial culture.

Opportunities:

• The small-caps “le SEIGNEUR” convention gives this curriculum a clean, reusable typographic solution to the YHWH-vs-Christological-Lord problem that can be documented once and applied consistently across all 25 chapters and any future OT curricula in this language pair.
• Hezekiah’s explicit “trust” (batach, 18:5) versus Ahaz’s/Israel’s alliance-seeking gives teaching material a ready-made positive/negative case-study pair distinct from, but complementary to, the baseline’s “faith” doctrine.
• Naaman’s Gentile monotheistic confession (5:15) offers a natural bridge to the Romans baseline’s universal-scope-of-the-gospel doctrine without requiring new vocabulary.
• The comparative theology analysis identifies genuine, teachable cross-tradition resonance points (Islamic warner-prophet pattern; Jewish teshuvah and living galut memory; Orthodox philanthropia) that can enrich, rather than complicate, the French-language teaching material if handled with the explicit care documented in 04_comparative_theology.md.

Recommended actions:

1. Lock assets/translation_memory.json (76 terms) and both registry files as mandatory Phase 2 pre-flight loads before any 2 Kings segment translation begins.
2. Route all segments touching the 6 Critical and 15 High doctrines (21 of 30 total) to mandatory human theologian review per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json; automate the “la Pâque”/“Pâques” orthographic check and the YHWH-vs-Elohim resolution check as non-negotiable pre-approval gates, not reviewer-dependent steps.
3. Weight Phase 2 Step 16 parallel-processing reviewer capacity toward chapters 15-17, 21, and 22-23, where Critical/High-risk density is highest.
4. Carry the six explicit cross-chapter consistency requirements (§D of 11_doctrine_analysis.md) — refrain wording, le SEIGNEUR/Dieu distinction, exile-term consistency, fulfillment-formula wording, the three-verse covenant-mercy formula, and the onction/Messie boundary — into automated validation rules in Phase 2 rather than relying on reviewer memory alone.
5. Brief all theologian reviewers on the France-specific sensitivities flagged in 04_comparative_theology.md (§ Cross-Doctrine Summary) before review begins, particularly regarding Jewish reception of the exile and hope-amid-judgment material.