Executive Summary — Judges (English → French)

Why it matters

Judges is Old Testament narrative, not New Testament epistle — a genre and vocabulary shift from the Romans baseline that this Language Package must absorb without breaking any existing convention. The book’s central office (“judge”), its recurring structural refrains, and its climactic thesis statement (“everyone did what was right in his own eyes”) sit directly against the grain of secular French individualism, France’s post-revolutionary discomfort with kingship language, and a live internal-Christian historical memory (the Wars of Religion’s iconoclasm controversy) that a careless translation could inadvertently reactivate. Get this wrong and French readers will systematically misread the book’s central office as a courtroom function, its closing thesis as an endorsement rather than an indictment, and its idol-condemnation as a swipe at Catholic sacred art.

Key findings

• Full-book coverage confirmed. All 21 chapters reviewed; chapters contributing no new terms (7, 10:1-5, 12:8-15) explicitly logged as reviewed, not omitted.
• 70 terms now sit in assets/translation_memory.json: 12 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline (God, Seigneur, saint, alliance, péché, Israël, prophète, Messie, Église, grâce, salut, Esprit Saint) and 58 new Judges-specific terms.
• The single highest-frequency risk is the covenant name YHWH (“le SEIGNEUR,” majuscules) — recurring dozens of times per chapter, Critical risk, and still flagged for reviewer confirmation against the Segond tradition’s “l’Éternel” before Phase 2 begins at scale.
• The single highest-consequence risk is the book’s twice-verbatim closing thesis (“chacun faisait ce qui lui semblait bon”), which collides head-on with secular French individualist ethics that treat personal moral autonomy as a default positive — the opposite of the text’s intent.
• A genuine linguistic gap exists with no clean fix: French cannot lexically distinguish Judges’ episodic, temporary Spirit-empowerment from the baseline’s permanent NT “Esprit Saint” indwelling; this must be handled by verb-phrase specificity and mandatory teaching notes, not word choice alone.

Risks

Risk tier	Term-level count (new Judges terms)	Doctrine-level count
Critical	4 (le SEIGNEUR/YHWH, juge office, “right in his own eyes” refrain, Jephthah’s vow)	2 (Moral Decline and the Need for a Righteous King; Rash Vows and the Danger of Human Presumption before God)
High	21 new terms (angel of the LORD, Spirit of the LORD, saved/delivered, did-not-know-the-LORD, evil-in-sight-of-LORD, abandoned/forsook, went-after/bowed-down, played-the-whore-after, anger-kindled, gave/sold-into-hand-of, moved-to-pity, LORD’s-soul-could-not-bear, more-corrupt-than-fathers, LORD-raised-up-judges, king, anoint, LORD-shall-rule-over-you, no-king-in-Israel, Nazirite, assembly/qahal, carved/molten-images)	11 (Cycle of Sin/Judgment/Deliverance; Apostasy and Covenant Unfaithfulness; God’s Judicial Wrath and Covenant Compassion; The Spirit’s Empowering of Judges; God’s Grace through Flawed Deliverers; The Absence of a Righteous King; The Angel of the LORD; Nazirite Vow and Consecration; Idolatry and Domestic Religious Syncretism; Covenant Community/Discipline/Assembly; Kingship Experiment/Abimelech)
Total requiring mandatory human theologian review	25 new terms + 4 inherited Critical/High terms reused (Messie, Seigneur, alliance, péché)	13 doctrines (2 Critical + 11 High), matching assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json risk_summary exactly
Medium	24 new terms	5 doctrines (native speaker review)
Low	5 new terms	0 doctrines

No Judges doctrine is rated Low risk — every doctrine in this curriculum requires at minimum native-speaker review, and 13 of 18 require mandatory human theologian sign-off.

Opportunities

• French Catholic hagiographical tradition (flawed saints genuinely used by God) gives a ready-made cultural bridge for teaching “God’s Grace through Flawed Deliverers” that translators should draw on explicitly in teaching notes.
• The liturgical “Christ Roi” (Christ the King) tradition offers a positive on-ramp for “The Absence of a Righteous King” doctrine, provided teaching material explicitly distinguishes the text’s covenant-kingship claim from any reading of historical French monarchy or republicanism.
• Segond 21 (S21, YouVersion ID 152) is confirmed as the recommended reference version for this curriculum’s citation and hyperlink conventions, consistent across Romans and Judges.
• The book’s OT vocabulary gaps (juge, naziréen, éphod, teraphim) are now fully identified with concrete compensation strategies (standing glosses, footnotes, disambiguation) rather than left as open translation risk.

Recommended actions

1. Confirm the YHWH rendering convention (“le SEIGNEUR” vs. Segond’s “l’Éternel”) with the curriculum’s theologian reviewer before any Phase 2 batch processing begins — this is the single highest-frequency term in the entire book.
2. Enforce the standing gloss on “juge” at first use in every document without exception; this is the book’s most-repeated technical term and its most severe false-friend risk.
3. Lock the verbatim rendering of both refrain pairs — “right in his own eyes” (17:6/21:25) and “no king in Israel” (17:6 context/18:1/19:1/21:25) — as non-negotiable fixed text, cross-checked in a dedicated consistency pass before Doctrinal Fidelity Review (Step 17).
4. Route all 13 Critical/High doctrines and their associated Critical/High terms to mandatory human theologian review per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json; do not allow automated-only or native-speaker-only sign-off for any of these.
5. Load both assets/translation_memory.json (Judges) and the baseline Romans translation_memory.json together for every Phase 2 session — several Judges terms (grâce, salut, Esprit Saint) are retained specifically for contrastive teaching against their Romans baseline sense, and omitting either file breaks that contrast.