Linguistic Gap Analysis: 2 Kings (French)

1. Purpose and Method

This analysis identifies, for the full text of 2 Kings (chapters 1–25):

1. Where French lacks a ready doctrinal-vocabulary equivalent for a Hebrew concept (missing vocabulary / lexical gaps).
2. Where French has too many competing senses attached to the natural rendering, requiring deliberate semantic “fencing” to prevent collision with Catholic sacramental practice, secular usage, Enlightenment deism, or the Romans baseline’s own NT Christological vocabulary (crowded semantic neighborhoods).
3. Where a transliteration (retain the Hebrew/proper noun form) is preferable to a paraphrase (explain the concept in ordinary French), and why.
4. A ranked list of this curriculum’s highest-risk ambiguities, to prioritize Phase 2 human theologian review routing per the doctrine risk registry conventions.

The core passage, 2 Kings 17:1–23, is the theological anchor of the whole curriculum — it contains the densest concentration of covenant-judgment, idolatry-catalog, and prophetic-warning vocabulary in the book — but this analysis covers the entire book, chapter by chapter, per the full-book coverage mandate.

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2. Full-Book Coverage Ledger

Chapters	Narrative content	New terms / doctrine load contributed	Gap-analysis status
1	Elijah, Ahaziah, fire from heaven, inquiry of Baal-zebub	homme de Dieu, consulter (legitimate vs. illegitimate object), Baal, signe/prodige	Reviewed — establishes the “consult which god?” ambiguity pattern used throughout the book
2	Elijah taken up; mantle transferred to Elisha	char de feu et chevaux de feu, manteau, une double portion de ton esprit	Reviewed — foundational Prophetic Ministry vocabulary; see §4 (Esprit collision)
3	Jehoram/Moab war; Elisha oracle; Moabite king’s son offered	sacrifice / offrande (holocauste) (pagan, non-normative use)	Reviewed — flags the need to mark a sacrificial term as a foreign, condemned act, not Mosaic practice
4	Elisha’s domestic miracles; Shunammite’s son revived	revenir à la vie (vs. Critical résurrection)	Reviewed — key crowded-neighborhood item, §4
5	Naaman healed of leprosy	lèpre (tzara’at)	Reviewed — ritual-impurity vs. modern-medical gloss needed
6	Siege miracles; servant’s eyes opened to angelic army	ouvrir les yeux (idiom, physical + spiritual sense)	Reviewed — dual-register idiom, flagged §5
7	Siege of Samaria relieved	No new terms	Reviewed — no new vocabulary; reinforces parole du SEIGNEUR fulfilled pattern
8	Elisha and Hazael; Jehoram/Ahaziah of Judah	marcher dans la voie de...	Reviewed — stock idiom, low risk
9	Jehu anointed and commissioned to avenge Ahab’s house	oindre/onction (royale), vengeance/venger	Reviewed — direct collision risk with Messie, see §4
10	Jehu’s purge of Baal worship	zèle	Reviewed — praised-yet-qualified motif, flagged for teaching nuance
11	Jehoiada the priest; Joash anointed; covenant renewed	sacrificateur, renouvellement de l'alliance	Reviewed — priest-term collision, see §4
12	Joash repairs the Temple	réparer/restaurer la maison du SEIGNEUR	Reviewed — precedent pattern for ch. 22
13	Elisha’s death; a corpse revived by his bones; mercy “for the sake of the covenant”	revenir à la vie (second occurrence), à cause de son alliance	Reviewed — grace-not-merit parallel to Romans baseline
14	Amaziah, Jeroboam II; God “had not yet spoken to blot out the name of Israel”	effacer le nom	Reviewed — Hope/Patience anchor verse (14:27)
15	Multiple short reigns; first Assyrian deportations begin (15:29)	exil/exiler (first occurrence)	Reviewed — Critical term’s narrative onset, escalates through ch. 17
16	Ahaz; first “made his son pass through the fire” (16:3)	faire passer par le feu (first occurrence)	Reviewed — Critical term, mandatory gloss established here
17	CORE PASSAGE. Fall of Samaria; full idolatry catalog; fulfillment formula; remnant note	Full concentration of Critical/High terms: exil, écarter...de devant sa face, craindre d'autres dieux, hauts lieux, mépriser/rejeter, armée du ciel, voyant, comme il l'avait annoncé..., il ne resta que la tribu de Juda seule	Reviewed in full — theological anchor; see §3, §6
18	Hezekiah’s reforms; Sennacherib’s field commander taunts YHWH	se confier en/faire confiance à, blasphème/outrage	Reviewed — counter-example to ch. 17’s Ahaz/Israel pattern
19	Hezekiah’s prayer; the angel of the LORD strikes the Assyrian camp	l'ange du SEIGNEUR	Reviewed — folk-piety collision, see §4
20	Hezekiah’s illness, healing, and the sign of the sundial	signe/prodige (recurrence)	Reviewed — no new term beyond ch. 1
21	Manasseh; mediums, necromancers, divination; child sacrifice repeated; measuring line and plummet	évoquer les morts/spiritisme et divination, divination et pratiques magiques, cordeau et fil à plomb	Reviewed — highest concentration of occult vocabulary in the book, see §4
22	Book of the Law rediscovered; Huldah consulted	le livre de la Loi, prophétesse	Reviewed — Josiah’s Reforms doctrine center
23	Covenant renewed; Passover restored; Topheth destroyed; “no king like Josiah” vs. judgment unreversed	renouvellement de l'alliance, la Pâque, Topheth/Molek, the Critical Josiah tension	Reviewed — sharpest textual tension in the book, see §6
24	Babylonian vassalage and first deportation; Temple vessels removed	les objets/ustensiles de la maison du SEIGNEUR	Reviewed — escalation toward ch. 25
25	Fall of Jerusalem; Temple destroyed; final exile; epilogue (Jehoiachin’s release)	Reuses exil, maison du SEIGNEUR; no new terms — epilogue tone shift	Reviewed — closing “hope amid judgment” note (25:27-30); no new vocabulary but highest doctrinal weight for the Hope-amid-Judgment doctrine’s resolution

Conclusion of coverage ledger: every chapter has been reviewed. Chapters 7 and 20 contribute no new vocabulary and are explicitly noted as such rather than silently omitted. All Critical-risk terms originate in chapters 15–17 (exile onset), 16/21 (child sacrifice), 11/22 (priesthood), and 23 (the Josiah tension) — confirming that Phase 2 review resourcing should weight these chapters most heavily, alongside the core passage itself.

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3. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix

Doctrine	Available French terms	Weaknesses of available terms	Recommended strategy
Covenant Judgment and the Exile	alliance (baseline reuse); exil/exiler (new); écarter/retrancher de devant sa face (new)	alliance alone carries no judgment-consequence sense; a bare French rendering of “exile” as déplacement or émigration would sound like voluntary or administrative relocation, erasing the forced, judicial, covenant-consequence force the Hebrew galah always carries.	Fix exil/exiler as the unique, never-softened rendering (Critical tier, mandatory theologian review every occurrence). Pair with écarter...de devant sa face for the relational dimension of banishment (echoing Eden) so exile reads as estrangement from God, not mere geography.
Prophetic Ministry and Miraculous Power (Elijah and Elisha)	prophète, homme de Dieu, parole du SEIGNEUR (all baseline-adjacent or newly fixed); voyant (fenced, paired term); signe/prodige; char de feu; une double portion de ton esprit	French has no distinct lexical item for the Hebrew office-word chozeh (“seer”) separate from navi (“prophet”) without importing the fortune-teller connotation of voyant; “esprit” in the double-portion phrase risks bleeding into the baseline’s Trinity-Person Esprit Saint.	voyant permitted only paired with prophète, never standalone. esprit in 2:9 kept lower-case and unqualified by “Saint” to preserve the OT prophetic-empowering sense as canonically continuous with, but not identical to, Pentecost’s Esprit Saint.
The Fall of Israel and Judah as Covenant Consequence	il fit ce qui est mal aux yeux du SEIGNEUR (evaluative refrain); hauts lieux; idoles; craindre (d'autres dieux); mépriser/rejeter; l'armée du ciel; images de fonte/veaux (d'or)	The evaluative refrain risks being read by a low-OT-literacy French audience as a moralistic checklist rather than a covenant-lawsuit verdict; idoles in standard French has lost the Hebrew gillulim’s dung/refuse contempt entirely; craindre is the identical verb for both legitimate and illegitimate fear, an irony French preserves only if the object is kept explicit every time.	Render the refrain verbatim at every occurrence (25 chapters) so its cumulative, escalating force is visible across the whole book. Consider an intensifying gloss for gillulim contexts (“idoles abominables”) in teaching notes. Never substitute a different verb for craindre between the two directions — the wordplay is deliberate and must survive translation.
God’s Patience through Repeated Prophetic Warning	avertir solennellement/témoigner; se détourner de ses mauvaises voies/revenir au SEIGNEUR; comme il l'avait annoncé par ses serviteurs les prophètes; effacer le nom	se convertir — the most natural-sounding French verb for “repent” — is unusable as the primary rendering because of its strong modern Catholic sacramental-penance-process connotation, which would narrow Kings’ behavioral, covenantal “turning” into an institutional rite.	Use se détourner/revenir consistently; reserve se convertir only as an occasional secondary gloss, never the primary rendering. Anchor effacer le nom (14:27) explicitly as the doctrine’s clearest single-verse statement of restrained mercy, so it is not treated as incidental narrative detail.
Josiah’s Reforms and the Rediscovered Law	la Loi/le livre de la Loi (baseline reuse + new compound); sacrificateur; renouvellement de l'alliance; la Pâque; s'humilier/avoir le cœur humilié	prêtre (the most common French word for the priestly office) collides with Catholic ordained sacramental clergy; Pâques (masculine plural, Christian Easter) is one letter/one grammatical gender away from la Pâque (feminine singular, the Jewish/OT feast) — an orthographic trap invisible to most non-specialist translators.	Fix sacrificateur as the primary OT-priest term for the whole curriculum, per the historic French Protestant Segond convention; permit prêtre only with mandatory gloss. Flag la Pâque vs. Pâques as a mandatory automated QA rule, not merely a stylistic preference.
Hope amid Judgment	il ne resta que la tribu de Juda seule (remnant note); effacer le nom; à cause de son alliance; the Josiah tension (ve-khamohu lo hayah / lo shav YHWH me-charon apo)	French has ready equivalents for each individual clause, but no single fixed French idiom captures the book’s paradox of genuine, particular mercy (David’s line, Judah’s survival, Josiah’s reward) coexisting with unretracted corporate judgment; a translator defaulting to smooth, resolved prose risks silently erasing the tension.	Treat the Josiah tension (23:25 vs. 23:26-27) as its own Critical-risk translation unit distinct from its component vocabulary; require an explicit translator’s note flagging that the juxtaposition must remain unresolved in French, exactly as in the Hebrew.

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4. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing

These are cases where the natural, idiomatic French rendering already carries strong competing associations (Catholic sacramental practice, secular/political usage, Enlightenment deism, folk piety, or the Romans baseline’s own NT vocabulary) that must be actively fenced off from the OT/2 Kings sense.

French term/phrase	Competing senses already active in French	Collision risk in 2 Kings	Fencing strategy
Seigneur	(a) Christological title for Jesus (Romans baseline, Critical); (b) feudal nobility (“le seigneur du château”); (c) covenant name YHWH (this curriculum)	Using unmarked “Seigneur” throughout 2 Kings would make readers unable to tell whether a given verse names the covenant God of Israel or silently imports the NT confession “Jesus is Lord”	Typographic small-caps convention le SEIGNEUR for every YHWH occurrence (§0 of core glossary), reserving unmarked “Seigneur” exclusively for NT Christological contexts outside this curriculum.
prêtre	Ordained Catholic sacramental clergy (confession, Mass)	Applying “prêtre” unqualified to Jehoiada or Hilkiah imports post-NT ecclesial categories (ordination, sacraments) onto the Levitical office	Fix sacrificateur as primary term; “prêtre” only with mandatory clarifying gloss.
voyant	(a) Legitimate OT seer office (chozeh); (b) contemporary French media “voyants”/psychics, horoscopes, call-in fortune-tellers	Standalone “voyant” for a prophet reads as endorsing occult fortune-telling — exactly the practice 2 Kings condemns (divination, mediums)	Never use unpaired; always “tout prophète et tout voyant” or equivalent explicit pairing.
église / temple	(a) Institutional Catholic Church (baseline Église); (b) French Protestant meeting-house convention (“le temple,” not “l’église”); (c) NT body-of-Christ sense (baseline)	“La maison du SEIGNEUR” in 2 Kings names one specific physical building, the Jerusalem sanctuary — readers could import either the modern-institution sense or the Protestant meeting-house sense	Consistently render la maison du SEIGNEUR / le Temple with explicit reference to “the ancient Jerusalem sanctuary,” never bare “l’église.”
ange gardien (folk category) vs. l’ange du SEIGNEUR	Popular French Catholic devotional category of a diffuse, comforting personal guardian angel	19:35’s single historical act of judgment (185,000 Assyrian dead) could be domesticated into vague devotional comfort rather than read as a decisive, one-time historical intervention	Present as a specific divine agent of judgment/deliverance tied to a datable historical event, not generic guardian-angel piety.
élection	Everyday political/democratic vocabulary (baseline flags this for Romans; equally live here for God’s continuing choice of David’s line, 17:18ff, 25:27-30)	A French reader’s first association with “élection” is a ballot, risking a competitive/meritocratic misreading of God’s unilateral covenant choice	Any teaching material invoking election language in 2 Kings must explicitly contrast divine sovereign choice with democratic election, per baseline convention.
Messie vs. onction/oindre (royale)	Baseline Critical term reserved for the ultimate eschatological Anointed One	Jehu’s and Joash’s anointing (9:6, 11:12) use the same root (mashach) as the Messianic title; a careless rendering could apply “Messie” to a this-worldly royal ritual	Strict lexical separation: “oindre/onction” for royal anointing; “Messie” never appears in 2 Kings translation output. Back-translation returning “Messie” for a royal-anointing segment = automatic error flag.
résurrection vs. revenir à la vie	Baseline Critical term for Christ’s unique, final, bodily, eschatological resurrection	Elisha’s revivals (4:35; 13:21) are real but temporary, non-eschatological — using “résurrection” would theologically overclaim these episodes and blur them with the unique NT doctrine	Reserve “résurrection” exclusively for the baseline’s Christological referent; use “revenir à la vie” for every 2 Kings revival narrative.
se convertir vs. se détourner/revenir au SEIGNEUR	Modern French Catholic sacramental-penance-process connotation	The Hebrew shuv names concrete, behavioral covenantal turning, not necessarily a sacramental rite	Use se détourner/revenir as primary; se convertir only as an occasional secondary gloss.
craindre (single verb, dual referent)	Same verb serves both legitimate reverence of YHWH and illegitimate dread/veneration of idols	17:7, 17:33-34, 17:39 depend on the narrator’s deliberate irony of using one verb for both; if a translator “corrects” this by varying the French verb, the irony (and the condemnation of syncretism) disappears	Preserve identical verb craindre in both directions; disambiguate only via explicit object, never via lexical substitution.
la Pâque vs. Pâques	Feminine singular OT/Jewish feast vs. invariable masculine Christian Easter	A single missed accent or gender agreement error converts Josiah’s Passover into “Easter,” a category error of considerable doctrinal consequence	Mandatory automated orthographic QA check at every occurrence (23:21-23).
gloire	Baseline’s divine “gloire” vs. secular military/celebrity “gloire” (very active in royal-narrative-heavy 2 Kings)	Repeated royal-conquest narratives create many opportunities for “gloire” to read as a king’s own achieved honor rather than God’s radiant presence	Reserve unqualified “gloire” for explicitly divine referents; human royal honor should be rendered with contextual qualifiers (“la gloire du roi,” never left ambiguous with God’s).
Père vs. pères/ancêtres	Baseline’s divine-Fatherhood sense (Romans, Adoption) vs. 2 Kings’ overwhelmingly ancestral “fathers” usage	Genealogical/covenant-with-the-fathers language (13:23 and dozens of regnal formulas: “he was buried with his fathers”) could wrongly import Trinitarian sonship resonance if rendered “Père”	Reserve “Père” strictly for the rare explicit divine-Fatherhood sense; default to “pères/ancêtres” for all ancestral usage.

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5. Missing Vocabulary (Lexical Gaps)

Cases where French has no ready equivalent at all, requiring either transliteration, a compound gloss, or a mandatory explanatory footnote — as distinct from §4’s crowded-neighborhood cases, where French has too many meanings rather than too few.

Concept	Nature of the gap	Recommended solution
bamah/bamot (high places)	No French cultural referent for open-air hilltop idolatrous shrines; “hauts lieux” is transparent geographically but opaque religiously	Compound rendering hauts lieux + mandatory explanatory gloss on first occurrence (“sanctuaires en plein air, souvent sur des collines, consacrés à des divinités autres que le SEIGNEUR ou à un culte illégitime du SEIGNEUR lui-même”)
gillulim (contemptuous “dung-idols”)	Standard French idoles is semantically correct but loses 100% of the original’s deliberate scatological contempt	Teaching-context intensifier idoles abominables; note in translator’s commentary that the Hebrew register is more visceral than any single French noun conveys
tzeva ha-shamayim (host of heaven)	No single French phrase distinguishes astral-body worship from the legitimate devotional image of “les armées célestes” (angelic hosts)	l'armée du ciel + mandatory first-occurrence gloss: ”= le culte des astres (soleil, lune, étoiles), non les anges”
pi-shnayim (double portion, firstborn inheritance custom)	Modern French readers have no intuitive grasp of ancient Near Eastern firstborn double-inheritance law, so the metaphor underlying “double portion of your spirit” (2:9) is invisible without explanation	Retain literal une double portion de ton esprit + brief explanatory note connecting it to firstborn inheritance custom (Deut 21:17), not merely “twice as much spiritual power”
chozeh vs. navi (seer vs. prophet, distinct Hebrew offices)	French collapses both into one conceptual space; there is no non-loaded second term available	voyant, permitted only paired with prophète (see §4); this is a forced compromise, not a clean solution, and should be flagged as such for reviewers
Ashéra (Canaanite goddess/cult-pole)	No French cultural equivalent; not a concept but a specific ANE proper name/object	Transliterate as proper noun Ashéra, capitalized, parallel to baseline’s treatment of “Abba”
Topheth / Molek	Place-name and deity-name specific to the child-sacrifice cult in the Valley of Hinnom; no equivalent concept in French cultural memory	Transliterate both as proper nouns Topheth / Molek; always read alongside the mandatory faire passer par le feu gloss
ov / yidde’oni (mediums/necromancers) as a category distinct from modern “voyance”	Contemporary French commercial “voyance”/spiritisme is culturally normalized and rarely treated as religiously transgressive by secular readers, unlike the Hebrew’s absolute prohibition	évoquer les morts / spiritisme et divination + explicit pastoral-application note that this is a live, not merely ancient, spiritual danger in contemporary France
Regnal évaluation triad (mitzvot/chuqqot/torah) as one fixed collocation	French has serviceable individual words (commandements, prescriptions, la Loi) but no single native triadic collocation that automatically signals “this is the complete covenant-obligation formula”	Fix the exact triad commandements / prescriptions (statuts) / la Loi and require verbatim reuse at every recurrence so readers learn to recognize the formula as a fixed unit, not incidental synonym-variation

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6. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decision Log

Item	Decision	Rationale
YHWH	Neither full transliteration (“Yahvé”) nor Segond’s denominational marker (“l’Éternel”) — instead a typographic device on the existing baseline term: le SEIGNEUR (small caps)	Preserves whole-curriculum lexical continuity with the Romans baseline’s Seigneur while replicating the English convention (LORD vs. Lord) that distinguishes covenant name from title. Avoids “Yahvé,” which is unfamiliar to non-specialist French readers and Bible-de-Jérusalem-marked; avoids “l’Éternel,” which is Segond-marked and can read as denominationally partisan to Catholic or secular readers.
Baal	Transliterate (Baal, plural les Baals)	Proper noun with no French translation possible; false etymological resonance with “seigneur/maître” must remain invisible, never exploited for wordplay.
Ashéra	Transliterate (Ashéra)	No French cultural referent; treated as proper name, parallel to baseline’s “Abba.”
Topheth / Molek	Transliterate (Topheth / Molek)	Proper nouns (place, deity); paraphrase would require restating the entire child-sacrifice concept redundantly with the already-mandatory faire passer par le feu gloss.
he’evir ba-esh (pass through the fire)	Paraphrase, with mandatory gloss, not transliteration	This is a euphemism, not a proper noun; transliterating a Hebrew verb phrase would communicate nothing to a French reader. The euphemistic register itself (concealing child sacrifice behind gentler language) must be preserved via an equivalent French euphemism, faire passer par le feu, glossed rather than replaced with a blunt clinical phrase like “sacrifier ses enfants,” which would lose the text’s own rhetorical restraint.
chozeh (seer)	Paraphrase using existing French Bible-tradition word voyant, with mandatory pairing constraint	A genuine transliteration (“chozeh”) would be unintelligible to lay readers and break with all existing French Bible translation convention; the paraphrase risk (fortune-teller drift) is instead managed by the pairing rule, not by transliteration.
Abba (cross-reference to Romans baseline)	N/A within 2 Kings (no direct occurrence)	Noted here only to confirm no conflict: 2 Kings introduces no comparable Aramaic intimacy-term requiring the same transliteration treatment.
pi-shnayim (double portion)	Paraphrase (une double portion de ton esprit) + explanatory note, not transliteration	The underlying legal custom (firstborn double inheritance), not the Hebrew phrase itself, is what requires explanation; transliterating the phrase would add an unfamiliar term without resolving the conceptual gap.
Regnal formula “did evil/right in the eyes of the LORD”	Paraphrase, fixed and verbatim	A calque translation (“fit le mal dans les yeux du SEIGNEUR”) is close enough to natural French idiom (“aux yeux de,” “à ses yeux”) that full paraphrase with fixed wording is both natural and necessary for the refrain’s cumulative recognition effect across 25 chapters.
tzara’at (leprosy)	Paraphrase (lèpre) with mandatory medical-category gloss	Transliteration would communicate nothing; the risk is not unfamiliarity but false familiarity — French readers will assume modern Hansen’s-disease leprosy unless the OT ritual-impurity category is explicitly distinguished.

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7. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities

Ranked by combined doctrinal weight and probability of translator/reader error, for Phase 2 review-routing priority. Tier follows the doctrine risk registry’s Critical/High/Medium/Low convention.

1. [Critical] le SEIGNEUR vs. unmarked Seigneur — losing the small-caps (or fallback “(YHWH)”) convention anywhere silently collapses the covenant name into the baseline’s NT Christological title, or into feudal-historical “seigneur,” in every one of 2 Kings’ hundreds of occurrences.
2. [Critical] exil/exiler softened toward neutral migration vocabulary (déplacement, émigration, installation) — would strip the book’s namesake judgment-doctrine of its forced, judicial force at its most load-bearing verses (15:29; 17:6, 23; 25:11).
3. [Critical] faire passer par le feu rendered or read as a purification/blessing rite rather than child sacrifice to Molech — a euphemism failure in either direction (too literal, losing the euphemistic register; or too soft, erasing the horror) at 16:3, 17:17, 21:6.
4. [Critical] sacrificateur replaced by unglossed prêtre — imports the entire modern Catholic sacramental-ordination framework onto Jehoiada and Hilkiah, a doctrinally significant category error given how load-bearing the priesthood is to Josiah’s Reforms.
5. [Critical] The Josiah tension (23:25 “no king like him” vs. 23:26-27 “the LORD did not turn from his anger”) smoothed into a single resolved statement — either a moralistic (“Josiah’s righteousness should have been enough”) or fatalistic (“individual righteousness is pointless”) misreading, both foreclosed by the Hebrew’s deliberate juxtaposition.
6. [Critical] onction/oindre (Jehu, 9:6; Joash, 11:12) back-translated or taught as Messie — collapses the unique, final Messianic-promise doctrine into a repeatable this-worldly royal ritual.
7. [High] écarter/retrancher de devant sa face flattened to a generic “il les a punis” — loses the relational-banishment, Eden-echoing force of 17:18, 17:20, 23:27, reducing covenant judgment to bare penalty.
8. [High] voyant appearing unpaired with prophète anywhere in 17:13 or elsewhere — reintroduces the exact fortune-teller/horoscope connotation the baseline explicitly rejected for navi, now smuggled back in through the chozeh rendering.
9. [High] l’armée du ciel (host of heaven, 17:16) read as angelic hosts rather than astral worship without the mandatory clarifying gloss — inverts the condemned practice into devotional imagery.
10. [High] craindre rendered with two different French verbs across 17:7 (fearing other gods) and 17:34/39 (fearing the LORD) — destroys the narrator’s deliberate ironic wordplay central to the syncretism critique.
11. [High] mépriser/rejeter rendered with different verbs in its two directions (17:15, Israel rejects God’s statutes; 17:20, God rejects Israel) — erases the lex talionis reciprocity that is the passage’s rhetorical hinge.
12. [High] évoquer les morts/spiritisme et divination (21:6) presented as historically distant rather than a live pastoral concern, given contemporary French commercial “voyance” culture — a missed contextualization risk rather than a lexical error, but doctrinally consequential for application.
13. [High] la Pâque miswritten as Pâques (23:21-23) — a single-letter/gender orthographic slip that converts Josiah’s Passover into the Christian Easter, a category error requiring mandatory automated QA, not just translator vigilance.
14. [High] se convertir substituted for se détourner/revenir as the primary rendering of shuv (17:13) — imports a Catholic sacramental-penance-process connotation onto Kings’ concrete, behavioral, covenantal turning language.
15. [Medium] revenir à la vie (4:35; 13:21) rendered or taught as résurrection — theologically overclaims Elisha’s temporary revivals as equivalent to Christ’s unique, final, eschatological resurrection.
16. [Medium] Père applied to ancestral “fathers” language (regnal burial formulas, 13:23-adjacent contexts) rather than reserved for the rare explicit divine-Fatherhood sense — a lower-frequency but recurring risk across dozens of regnal formulas throughout the book.
17. [Medium] gloire left unqualified in royal-conquest narratives, allowing human royal honor and divine glory to blur together — a diffuse, cumulative risk rather than a single-verse crisis, but relevant across the many king-narratives of chs. 3–21.

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8. Recommendations for Phase 2

1. Load this document alongside the core glossary (08_core_glossary.md) and both registry files before any 2 Kings segment translation begins; the crowded-neighborhood fencing rules in §4 function as additional forbidden-substitution constraints layered on top of the baseline’s existing forbidden-substitution list.
2. Route every occurrence of ranked items 1–6 (§7) to mandatory human theologian review, consistent with the doctrine risk registry’s Critical-tier convention; items 7–14 to native speaker review at minimum, with theologian review recommended wherever the segment also touches Deity/Sonship/Lordship-adjacent material inherited from the Romans baseline (e.g., any segment discussing the Davidic covenant’s typological link to Messianic promise).
3. Add an automated QA rule specifically for the la Pâque / Pâques orthographic distinction (item 13) — this is checkable mechanically and should not depend on reviewer vigilance alone.
4. Any segment employing voyant, craindre (dual-direction), or mépriser/rejeter (dual-direction) should trigger an automated consistency check confirming the required pairing or verb-identity constraints are met before human review, to reduce reviewer load on mechanically verifiable risks.
5. Teaching materials built on this curriculum should make the Josiah tension (item 5) and the remnant/hope motif (17:18’s “only the tribe of Judah remained,” 14:27’s “not yet blot out the name”) explicit discussion points rather than allowing smooth narrative prose to resolve them prematurely.