Executive Summary: Genesis (English → French)

Why it matters

Genesis anchors eight major doctrines — Creation Ex Nihilo, the Image of God, the Fall, the Abrahamic Covenant, Providence, Common Grace, Covenant Faithfulness, and Joseph’s story — for a French readership split between a large nominally/practicing Catholic majority, a small Reformed/evangelical minority, and a growing biblically unchurched secular population, alongside historically significant Jewish and Muslim communities who read parts of this same text (Abraham, Joseph/Surah Yusuf) as their own. Unlike Romans’ abstract doctrinal argument, Genesis narrates its doctrines through concrete family stories — which increases vividness but also increases the risk that a single word choice (créer, image, alliance, élection, l’Éternel vs. le Seigneur) silently imports the wrong theological frame.

Key findings

• 28 sub-doctrines identified across Genesis 1–50 (extending the curriculum’s 8 named doctrines), of which 6 are Critical-risk and 14 are High-risk — a combined 20 doctrines requiring mandatory human theologian review, versus 6 requiring native-speaker review and 2 automated-only.
• 108 enforced glossary terms in the Genesis translation memory: 28 inherited exactly from the baseline Romans package (7 Critical, 4 High, 16 Medium, 5 Low, with extended Genesis-specific notes) plus 80 new Genesis-specific terms (4 Critical, 14 High, and the remainder Medium/Low) — a combined 25 Critical/High-risk terms requiring theologian-level scrutiny.
• The single highest-stakes NEW decision this book introduces beyond Romans is the YHWH divine-name rendering convention (Genesis 2:4 onward): fixed as “le Seigneur / le SEIGNEUR,” with the competing Segond-tradition “l’Éternel” flagged for reviewers — a decision with no Romans-era analogue, since the New Testament never faces the Tetragrammaton question directly.
• Genesis introduces a distinct risk category largely absent from Romans: genuinely untranslatable Hebrew wordplay (adam/adamah, Babel/balal) and Hebrew lexical echoes invisible in French (chashab links Genesis 15:6’s “imputed righteousness” to Genesis 50:20’s “God meant it for good” — a connection recoverable only via mandatory teaching notes, never from the French text alone).
• Two live French cultural forces converge specifically on the Image of God doctrine (Critical): Catholic devotional culture’s association of “image” with icônes/statues, and French Republican secular humanism’s readiness to affirm human dignity (droits de l’homme) as self-grounding, detached from the Creator the doctrine actually requires.

Risks

• Critical: YHWH rendering inconsistency across curriculum materials; “justice méritée” contaminating Genesis 15:6 (the doctrine’s OT source verse); “descendance” flattened into mere biology at Genesis 3:15/12:7/49:10, severing the protoevangelium from its messianic fulfillment.
• High: “créer” read as ordinary human creativity rather than ex nihilo; “dominer/soumettre” read as ecological exploitation license (live French Laudato Si’-era discourse); “se repentit” wrongly implying God erred at Genesis 6:6; “holocauste” triggering Shoah associations at Genesis 22; “élection” read as a democratic/competitive process in the Isaac/Ishmael and Jacob/Esau narratives; “païens” wrongly imported into Genesis 10’s pre-covenant “nations.”
• Medium: “grâce” asserted where the Hebrew text of the Common Grace passages (3:21; 4:15; 8:21-22; 9:8-17) never actually uses a grace-word; chesed rendered inconsistently across occurrences absent a fixed working phrase; genealogical (toledot) sections skimmed as mere record-keeping, losing their Covenant Faithfulness argument.

Opportunities

• Genesis 9:6’s grounding of universal human dignity explicitly in the Image of God offers a strong, respectful bridge into France’s droits-de-l’homme discourse — affirming the shared conclusion while supplying the Creator-grounding secular humanism lacks.
• The Joseph narrative’s deep resonance with Surah Yusuf (Qur’an 12) offers unusually strong interfaith common ground with France’s Muslim community, if handled with the distinct Christian theological points (the chashab lexical link to Genesis 15:6) preserved via teaching notes rather than assumed.
• Genesis 15:6, already the Old Testament source Paul quotes in Romans 4:3, allows this curriculum to teach justification by faith with its full canonical depth — showing French readers the doctrine did not begin with Paul.

Recommended actions

1. Secure explicit reviewer/editorial sign-off on the YHWH rendering convention (“le Seigneur/le SEIGNEUR”) before any Phase 2 translation begins; document the Segond “l’Éternel” alternative for cross-resource awareness but never let it appear inconsistently within this curriculum.
2. Enforce the mandatory ex-nihilo gloss (“à partir de rien”) on every “créer” occurrence and the mandatory Creator-grounding gloss on every “image de Dieu” occurrence at the teaching-note level, not just the base translation.
3. Route all 20 Critical/High-risk doctrines and all 25 Critical/High-risk terms to human theologian review per the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md, with particular priority on Genesis 15:6, Genesis 3:15, and every YHWH occurrence.
4. Adopt “fidélité bienveillante” as the fixed working rendering for chesed and “grâce commune” as the fixed, glossed technical label for Common Grace narrative instances, both flagged at first occurrence in every lesson.
5. Brief native-speaker reviewers on the genealogical (toledot) sections’ theological function so they are taught, not skimmed, preserving the Covenant Faithfulness across Generations doctrine’s full weight.