Executive Summary: Leviticus — English → French

Why it matters

Leviticus is the theological engine room of the whole Bible’s sacrificial and holiness vocabulary — and French is uniquely, structurally hazardous terrain for translating it. Two collisions are severe enough to derail comprehension entirely if mishandled: the traditional French rendering of “burnt offering” (“holocauste”) is the near-universal French word for the Shoah, and “le tabernacle” in ordinary French usage denotes a small altar-side cabinet, not a tent-shrine the size of a courtyard. Both require mandatory, non-negotiable rendering changes from the historic Segond tradition. This package extends the Romans French Language Package to the full 27 chapters of Leviticus, anchored in Leviticus 16:1–34 (the Day of Atonement), without altering any baseline decision.

Key findings

• 62 terms now populate the Leviticus translation memory: 8 inherited unchanged from the Romans baseline (holy, sin, covenant, glory, god, israel, law, messiah) and 54 newly established for this book’s cultic, legal, and calendrical vocabulary.
• 4 Critical-risk terms require theologian sign-off on every occurrence: burnt offering (olah → “sacrifice entièrement consumé,” never “holocauste”), atonement (kipper → “expiation”), God (“Dieu”/“le SEIGNEUR”), and the Leviticus 17:11 blood/life/atonement compound verse, which must be reviewed as an indivisible doctrinal unit.
• 18 High-risk terms carry significant denominational-conflation or cultural-collision risk, including mercy seat/propitiatoire (must match Romans 3:25’s hilastērion), scapegoat/bouc émissaire (a fully secularized French idiom for blame-shifting), tabernacle/tente de la Rencontre, confession (Catholic sacrament collision), ordination/consécration sacerdotale (apostolic-succession collision), sabbath/sabbat (never “dimanche”), and jubilé (Catholic Holy Year collision).
• 24 doctrines are tracked in the doctrine risk registry: 3 Critical + 9 High = 12 doctrines requiring mandatory human theologian review, 11 requiring native speaker review, and 1 (firstfruits/offering procedure) sufficient for automated review only.
• France’s specific religious landscape — a large, actively observant Jewish community (Yom Kippur, Shabbat, kashrut are living practices, not historical background), a dominant Catholic sacramental-vocabulary default (confession, ordination, consecration, tabernacle, jubilee all have strong competing Catholic referents), and a secular intellectual tradition (Girard’s scapegoat theory, Mary Douglas’s purity anthropology) taught widely in French universities — creates a denser concentration of high-stakes lexical collisions than the Romans baseline encountered.

Risks

• Highest severity, non-negotiable: rendering olah as “holocauste” anywhere in destination material. This is not a stylistic archaism (as with Hindi- or Portuguese-language equivalents) but a live offense and category-error risk given Vichy-era history; every occurrence across chs. 1, 6–9, 16, 22–23 must be verified as “sacrifice entièrement consumé.”
• Supersessionism risk: the Day of Atonement, Sabbath, dietary law, and appointed feasts must be taught as fulfilled in Christ (a Christian theological claim) without dismissing, minimizing, or implicitly superseding France’s currently living Jewish observance of the same institutions.
• Sacrament-collision risk: “confession,” “ordination,” “consécration,” and “communion” (for the peace offering) all default, for French readers of every background, to specific Catholic sacramental rites structurally different from what Leviticus depicts; each requires an explicit clarifying gloss, not a one-time footnote.
• Idiom-trivialization risk: “bouc émissaire” is now fully secularized in French political and media usage; without active anchoring to the substitution doctrine, the term will carry zero theological weight to a French reader.
• Scale-collision risk: “tabernacle” will cause most French readers to picture the wrong-sized object entirely, distorting the doctrine of God’s dwelling among his people.

Opportunities

• France’s positive, live cultural recognition of “Yom Kippour,” the menorah, and incense/aspersion imagery (Catholic liturgical continuity) means several terms that would be opaque in other target languages arrive pre-equipped with helpful, not harmful, associations — these can be leveraged pedagogically rather than merely fenced.
• The direct LXX-to-NT lexical bridges surfaced in this analysis (kapporet↔hilastērion/Romans 3:25; nasa↔Isaiah 53; anointing oil↔christos; qahal↔ekklēsia) give this curriculum a built-in opportunity to reinforce cross-curriculum vocabulary consistency with the existing Romans package, provided the “propitiatoire” rendering is actively coordinated across both.
• “Alliance” for covenant carries a helpful, pre-existing positive French resonance (the wedding ring, “l’alliance”) that Leviticus 26’s blessing/curse material can draw on constructively.

Recommended actions

1. Lock “sacrifice entièrement consumé” and “expiation” as absolute, zero-exception renderings before any Phase 2 segment translation begins; treat any draft output containing “holocauste” as an automatic pipeline halt, not merely a flag.
2. Confirm cross-document consistency for “propitiatoire” against the Romans-curriculum rendering of Romans 3:25’s hilastērion before finalizing any Leviticus 16 material.
3. Apply mandatory first-use glossing (per assets/translation_memory.json and 12_ai_translation_requirements.md) for tabernacle, confession, ordination, scapegoat, jubilee, and vow in every teaching unit, not just once per curriculum.
4. Route all 12 Critical/High-tier doctrines and the Leviticus 17:11 compound verse to mandatory human theologian review per doctrine_risk_registry.json; route the 11 Medium-tier doctrines to native speaker review.
5. Brief all reviewers on France’s specific comparative-theology landscape (04_comparative_theology.md) before assigning Leviticus 16, 19, 23, or 25 material, given the concentrated supersessionism and sacrament-collision risks unique to this book.

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Companion to 07_semantic_analysis.md, 08_core_glossary.md, 04_comparative_theology.md, 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, 11_doctrine_analysis.md, assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, and assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json. Load all Phase 1 deliverables before beginning Phase 2 segment translation of any Leviticus unit.