Executive Summary — Joshua — English → French

Why it matters

Joshua is a narrative book demanding more explanatory scaffolding than Romans for a French readership with low Old Testament literacy — and it contains the single highest-severity translation risk in either curriculum: the term cherem (“devoted to destruction”), which collides with both Catholic canon-law “anathème” and France’s live media vocabulary for jihadist “guerre sainte.” Get this book’s core passage (24:14-15) and its judgment vocabulary right, and the curriculum lands as intended: a call to exclusive covenant loyalty grounded in God’s proven faithfulness. Get it wrong, and the translation risks either theological softening or serious cultural offense in a country with acute, legally-protected sensitivity around Holocaust vocabulary.

Key findings

• 7 curriculum doctrines analyzed across all 24 chapters, with full chapter-by-chapter coverage confirmed — no chapter silently skipped, including the boundary-list chapters (15-19) that introduce no new vocabulary.
• 1 Critical-risk doctrine (Holy War and Divine Judgment) and 5 High-risk doctrines (Land Promise, Rahab/Inclusion, Covenant Renewal at Shechem, Obedience and the Conquest, Rest as Salvation-Type) require mandatory human theologian review — 6 of 7 doctrines total, only “Courage through God’s Presence” is Medium-tier.
• 39 new Joshua-specific glossary terms added to translation memory: 2 Critical (cherem, olah/burnt offering), 9 High (YHWH/Seigneur, serve, choose, chesed, commander of the LORD’s army, hardened hearts, possess/dispossess, inheritance, avenger of blood, rest), 20 Medium, 8 Low.
• 29 baseline Romans terms carried forward unmodified, of which 5 are High-risk in this book too (Seigneur, la Loi, élection, grâce, obéissance de la foi) — no Critical-tier baseline terms were judged directly relevant to Joshua’s vocabulary.
• Combined Critical+High term count requiring mandatory theologian review: 16 (2 Critical + 14 High across inherited and new terms).

Risks

• Triple French-specific collision at Critical severity: “anathème” (Catholic excommunication), “guerre sainte” (jihadist-terrorism media shorthand), and “holocauste” (the Shoah) each independently disqualify the traditional/obvious French renderings for cherem and olah — no existing single French word is safe to use unglossed.
• Core-passage domestication: 24:15’s “choisissez” is exposed to France’s “spirituality marketplace” idiom (“choisissez votre propre vérité”), which would invert Joshua’s binary, no-third-option demand into consumer-relativist messaging.
• Political over-reading: land-promise and “Israël” vocabulary (chs. 13-21) risk being read as commentary on the contemporary Israel–Palestine conflict, given France’s large Jewish and Muslim communities.
• Secular flattening: “fort et courageux” (courage), “méditer” (meditation), “repos” (rest), and “héritage” (inheritance) all have common, low-weight secular French meanings (motivational slogans, mindfulness practice, a nap, a will) that silently strip their covenantal freight if left unglossed.
• Moral-memory collision: France’s own 20th-century reckoning with “obedience to unjust orders” (Occupation-era memory) makes “Obedience and the Conquest” material culturally loaded in a way it is not for most other audiences.

Opportunities

• France’s historic Huguenot/Reformed memory of costly public confession under persecution offers a resonant, ready-made frame for Joshua 24’s public, binding covenant declaration.
• Rahab’s narrative converges positively across Jewish and Christian tradition (both honor her), giving the “Inclusion of the Nations” doctrine unusually strong cross-tradition common ground to build on.
• The tawhid-adjacent exclusive-monotheism demand of 24:14-15 has the strongest cross-religious resonance of any doctrine in this curriculum for Muslim-heritage French readers, if handled without conflating Joshua’s covenant framework with Islamic categories.
• No wholly new French vocabulary needs to be invented anywhere in the book; every identified gap is resolvable through compound glosses, footnotes, and contextual fencing already proven in the Romans package’s methodology.

Recommended actions

1. Lock the mandatory standing footnote for every cherem and olah occurrence before Phase 2 begins; treat this as a non-negotiable release gate, not a stylistic preference.
2. Fix the final French rendering of Joshua 24:14-15 at Phase 2 Step 16 and hold it invariant across every subsequent lesson and document, per the core-passage consistency rule.
3. Route all chapter 24, chapter 6-11, and chapter 20 segments to mandatory human theologian review; route chapters 3, 5, 9, 12, 14, 19, 22 to native speaker review; automate only chapters 15-18.
4. Brief all Phase 2 reviewers explicitly on the three Critical French collisions (anathème, guerre sainte, holocauste) and the political-neutrality requirement for land-promise/Israël language before any segment is approved.
5. Merge assets/translation_memory.json v2 into the active Phase 2 enforcement pipeline before any Joshua segment is processed; do not process against the bare Romans-only baseline.