Executive Summary: Ruth (English → French)

Why it matters

Ruth is the first Old-Testament-narrative curriculum layered onto this project’s French Language Package, which until now has only been proven against a Greek New Testament book (Romans). Ruth introduces a Hebrew→LXX Greek→French translation chain, a constructed-compound doctrinal term with no French precedent (hesed), and a typographic doctrine-fence (le SEIGNEUR vs. seigneur) that Phase 2 tooling has never had to enforce before. Getting this Phase 1 foundation right determines whether Ruth 1:16-17 — the curriculum’s core passage and, for France’s Jewish community, an entirely independent and cherished conversion text — is taught with its full theological force intact across a religiously mixed francophone audience (Catholic-majority heritage, small Protestant minority, significant Jewish community, strong secular laïcité).

Key findings

• 6 core doctrines, 16 total doctrines tracked. Hesed, Kinsman-Redeemer, Providence, Gentile Inclusion, Loyalty/Faithfulness, and Genealogy are the curriculum anchors; 10 subsidiary doctrines (divine name typology, levirate marriage, legal redemption custom, lament, etc.) carry independent translation risk and are fully documented.
• 5 Critical-risk and 5 High-risk doctrines require mandatory human theologian review — 10 of 16 doctrines, or 63%, versus the Romans baseline’s 12 of 40 (30%). Ruth is proportionally a higher-risk curriculum than Romans at the doctrine level.
• 8 Critical-risk and 10 High-risk terms in the core glossary (18 of 38 terms, 47%) require theologian-level review — concentrated overwhelmingly in chapters 1, 2, and 4.
• One genuinely new French vocabulary gap: hesed has no native French one-word equivalent uniting covenant loyalty and tenderness; the curriculum adopts the constructed compound “bonté fidèle” and must fence it against the baseline’s already-fixed “grâce.”
• One genuinely inverting-risk term: “hasard” (2:3) is the natural French word for the narrator’s “chance,” but modern French “hasard” means the opposite of what the text asserts (purposeless randomness vs. concealed providence).

Risks

• Hesed/Grace collision (Critical): reusing baseline “grâce” for hesed would silently erase the Hesed doctrine’s distinctiveness from Romans’ forensic Grace doctrine — the single highest risk in the curriculum.
• Divine name typographic collapse (Critical): small-caps “le SEIGNEUR” (YHWH) vs. lowercase “seigneur” (Boaz, 2:13) is doctrinally load-bearing; any format that drops case (plain text, OCR, audio, subtitles) risks either divinizing a human character or flattening the divine Name into an ordinary title.
• Kinsman-Redeemer over-typologizing (Critical): French “rédempteur” is already a fixed Christ-title in Catholic and Protestant devotion; without a mandatory first-occurrence gloss, readers will skip past the concrete Torah legal institution (land/levirate/name redemption) the typology depends on.
• Moabite exclusion background gap (Critical): French readers have essentially zero residual cultural memory of Deuteronomy 23:3’s Moabite exclusion (unlike, say, “bon Samaritain”); without a footnote, “Inclusion of Gentiles” collapses into generic multiculturalism and loses its scandal.
• Providence double-bind (High): the doctrine faces failure risk from both directions in French — “providence” risks Enlightenment-deist impersonal abstraction, “hasard” risks purposeless-randomness — and both must be actively corrected, not just one.
• Supersessionism sensitivity (Critical, France-specific): France’s significant Jewish community reads Ruth’s conversion as its own non-Christological gerut paradigm; teaching materials must never imply the Jewish covenant is superseded or that this reading is subordinate to the Christian typological one.
• Cross-document inconsistency (High): “Perez” has two live French forms (Pérets/Pharès) that must be reconciled with this curriculum’s Matthew document before Phase 2 begins, or Ruth 4 and Matthew 1 will appear to disagree.

Opportunities

• France’s “arbre de Jessé” (Tree of Jesse) art tradition (e.g., Chartres) gives the Genealogy doctrine a ready-made, culturally resonant on-ramp against the otherwise strong risk of readers skimming 4:18-22 as inert record.
• France’s robust social-welfare tradition (“la protection sociale”) offers an apt cultural bridge for teaching the Torah gleaning-law background (Lev 19:9-10) behind Boaz’s kindness.
• The baseline’s existing Romans 10:9 “Seigneur” confession gives Ruth’s divine-name typology doctrine a direct, ready-built forward connection — the LXX κύριος bridge is already established infrastructure, not a new one.
• Jewish tradition’s own high regard for Ruth (read at Shavuot, the paradigm conversion text) is a genuine point of respectful common ground that can be surfaced without doctrinal compromise on either side.

Recommended actions

1. Merge this package’s translation_memory.json and bible_term_registry.json into the project’s central enforcement databases before Phase 2 begins; do not run Phase 2 against the Romans-only baseline files.
2. Resolve the Perez/Pérets/Pharès and Chilion/Élimélek transliteration decisions against this curriculum’s Matthew document now, and record the decision in translation memory, before any chapter 4 segment is processed.
3. Route every segment touching Hesed, Kinsman-Redeemer, Divine Name/Lordship Typology, Gentile Inclusion, Conversion, or Genealogy to human theologian review by default — do not rely on per-segment risk detection alone given the density of Critical-tier content in chapters 1, 2, and 4.
4. Build the mandatory non-optional reader-facing footnotes (Deut 23:3 for Moab; hasard’s providential gloss; hesed’s first-occurrence definition; the levirate/sandal custom; the rédempteur legal gloss) directly into the base document template so they cannot be silently dropped by downstream editors.
5. Add an automated typographic QA pass specifically checking small-caps “SEIGNEUR” integrity across every export format (web, print, audio script, subtitles) before any Ruth material ships.