Executive Summary: Ezekiel → French Language Package

Why it matters

Ezekiel is being added to a French Bible-curriculum pipeline whose only prior asset is a Romans language package. Ezekiel is a different kind of text — Hebrew, not Greek; visionary and architectural, not epistolary; saturated with the Tetragrammaton (~430x) and “Adonai YHWH” (~217x) where Romans needed neither. The core passage, Ezekiel 37:1-14 (the valley of dry bones), sits exactly at the seam where this curriculum’s central doctrine (national restoration pictured as revival from death) is most likely to be silently overwritten by the Romans baseline’s fixed, Critical-risk term “résurrection.” Getting this package right protects seven headline doctrines and the whole book’s full 48-chapter arc from doctrinal bleed-through in both directions between curricula.

Key findings

• 24 curriculum doctrines identified across all 48 chapters, none silently omitted; every “reuse” chapter (5, 12, 19, 21, 23, 26-27, 30, 33, 35, 42, 46) is explicitly logged as continuing a named doctrine rather than skipped.
• 7 Critical-risk and 6 High-risk doctrines (13 of 24) require mandatory human theologian review — including The Glory and Sovereignty of God, God’s Presence Departing and Returning, Individual Responsibility for Sin, The New Heart and New Spirit, Grace Apart from Merit, Restoration and the Valley of Dry Bones (the core passage), and Divine Presence Named Forever (YHWH-Shammah).
• Term-level registry contains ~122 enforced entries (46 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 76 new to Ezekiel); of these, 40 are Critical or High risk (12 Critical, 28 High) and require theologian-level review routing.
• The single highest cross-curriculum collision risk: Ezekiel 18’s “justice” (retributive, works-based, individual, non-transferable) uses the identical French word the Romans baseline fixed for forensic, imputed, faith-apart-from-works righteousness — the opposite theological structure, in the same word.
• The core passage’s defining translation constraint: Hebrew chayah (“live/revive”) must never be rendered “résurrection”; the vision’s own text (v.11) names the referent as “toute la maison d’Israël” — corporate/national, not individual bodily resurrection. Hebrew ruach additionally forces an unavoidable three-way French split (Esprit/souffle/vent) across the same 14 verses.
• New mandatory typographic layer: YHWH → “le SEIGNEUR” (small caps), Adonai YHWH → “Seigneur DIEU” — a structural, not just lexical, requirement given ~650 combined occurrences; any formatting lapse at scale silently erases the book’s name-theology.

Risks

• Doctrinal bleed-through between curricula on “justice” (Ezekiel 18 vs. Romans 3-4) and “résurrection” (Ezekiel 37 vs. Romans 6/8, 1 Corinthians 15) is the top risk category; both are fenced with mandatory contrast notes but require disciplined enforcement at scale, not just one-time documentation.
• French-culture-specific collision points: “fils d’homme” (~93 occurrences) visually collides with the NT Christological title “le Fils de l’homme”; “chérubins” has drifted toward “cute baby” in colloquial French; “habiter/demeurer” risks unconscious absorption into Catholic Eucharistic “présence réelle” vocabulary; “gloire” risks flattening into secular triumphalism (Napoleon-style “gloire”) exactly where the doctrine needs vulnerability (a glory that can depart).
• Heightened political/historical sensitivity beyond anything in the Romans baseline: judgment oracles on “Jérusalem”/“Israël,” the land-allotment vision (chs. 47-48), and Gog and Magog (chs. 38-39) intersect France’s Vichy-era history, its large Jewish community, and contested popular end-times schemes; careless framing risks real cultural harm, not just theological imprecision.
• Production-scale execution risk: the YHWH small-capitals convention and the ruach three-way split both depend on typography and translator-note discipline holding at hundreds of occurrences across 48 chapters — a systemic risk distinct from any single term’s conceptual difficulty.

Opportunities

• Strong devotional assets already exist in the French Catholic and ecumenical tradition: Ezekiel 37 is a set Easter Vigil/Holy Saturday reading, Ezekiel 36’s new-heart promise resonates with the Renouveau charismatique catholique, and Ezekiel 1’s throne-vision has centuries of cathedral-iconography reception (the tetramorph) — all can be leveraged for warmth and reception once the doctrinal fences (résurrection, Esprit Saint, présence réelle) are clearly taught alongside them.
• Genuine cross-tradition convergence points (Individual Responsibility with Islamic taklif and Qur’anic dry-bones imagery; Jewish Ma’aseh Merkabah and Shekhinah theology as the direct root of this book’s presence-theology) offer legitimate, respectful teaching material for interfaith-aware French contexts without requiring doctrinal compromise.
• The pipeline’s existing baseline discipline transfers well: the same Critical/High/Medium/Low framework, the same escalation routing, and the same forbidden-substitution mechanism used for Romans now extend cleanly to Ezekiel, requiring extension rather than redesign.

Recommended actions

1. Enforce the YHWH small-capitals convention as a structural linting rule, not a stylistic suggestion, in every Phase 2 batch run, given ~650 combined Tetragrammaton/Adonai-YHWH occurrences.
2. Mandate the Ezekiel-18/Romans-justice contrast note and the résurrection/chayah forbidden-substitution check as automated pre-submission gates, not just theologian-review flags, given how easily both errors could pass casual review.
3. Route all 13 theologian-required doctrines and all 40 Critical/High terms through human theologian review before any Phase 2 segment touching them is marked approved; do not downgrade to native-speaker-only review under production-schedule pressure.
4. Brief all reviewers explicitly on France’s Vichy-era sensitivity before any judgment-on-Jerusalem/Israel or Gog-and-Magog material enters Phase 2, given the acutely higher stakes than the Romans baseline’s general Israel note.
5. Carry forward the Romans baseline’s Traduction du Monde Nouveau exclusion list unchanged — Ezekiel’s dense YHWH vocabulary makes the “Jéhovah” substitution risk, if anything, more tempting to an untrained translator than it was in Romans; treat this as a zero-tolerance forbidden substitution.

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This summary synthesizes 07_semantic_analysis.md, 08_core_glossary.md, 04_comparative_theology.md, 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, 11_doctrine_analysis.md, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, and assets/translation_memory.json. It does not introduce new doctrinal decisions; all figures are drawn from those artifacts.