01 — Executive Summary: Ezekiel → German

The big picture: Ezekiel’s German translation package is ready for Phase 2, anchored on Ezekiel 37:1-14 (the Valley of Dry Bones), but it carries the highest concentration of cross-curriculum collision risk identified anywhere in this pipeline to date — because German already has fixed, heavily-loaded vocabulary for several of this book’s central words, borrowed from other books in this same pipeline.

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Why it matters

Ezekiel is Hebrew Old Testament prophecy, not New Testament epistle or Gospel — and German already has strong, settled instincts for several of its key words (Menschensohn, Auferstehung, Herz, Seele, Heiden) built entirely from NT usage. Every one of those instincts is wrong by default for at least one major passage in this book. Getting this package right means actively working against vocabulary this pipeline itself already trained German readers to expect.

Key findings

• 40 Critical + High risk translation terms identified (21 Critical, 19 High), spanning both newly-introduced Ezekiel vocabulary and baseline terms reused with new, restricted scope (resurrection, flesh, gentiles, church).
• 14 of 25 doctrines in the full-book doctrine matrix require mandatory human theologian review (6 Critical + 8 High); 8 more require native speaker review; only 3 are automated-review-only.
• The single highest risk in the entire package: “Menschensohn” (God’s address to Ezekiel, ~93 occurrences) is lexically identical to the fixed messianic “Son of Man” title already load-bearing across this pipeline’s four Gospel packages — a guaranteed, not merely plausible, cross-curriculum misreading without mandatory disambiguating footnotes.
• The core passage’s defining risk runs in the opposite direction from most doctrine-preservation work in this pipeline: German’s “Auferstehung” is so strongly anchored to Easter and personal resurrection that translators must actively restrain over-Christianizing a text (37:11) that explicitly names its own primary referent as Israel’s national restoration from exile.
• A genuinely untranslatable wordplay sits at the passage’s climax: Ezekiel 37:9’s fourfold use of ruach (wind/breath/spirit, one Hebrew word) has no single German equivalent and requires a mandatory explanatory note, not a lexical fix.

Risks

• Doctrine bleed-through: Ezekiel 18’s individual, works-based, non-transferable righteousness argument sits in real tension with this pipeline’s heavily-defended Reformation-era forensic-righteousness architecture (Romans). German readers, more Reformation-primed than most audiences, will notice.
• Antisemitism-sensitivity collision: “sein Blut komme auf sein Haupt” (Ezekiel’s individual-accountability idiom) is a near-exact surface match for Matthew 27:25’s antisemitism-weaponized cry, already the highest-sensitivity term in this pipeline’s Matthew package. Conflating the two in exposition is a live, foreseeable error.
• Typographic fragility: the “Herr, HERR” small-caps convention (~130+ occurrences) is a genuine production risk — any plain-text output path (audio, subtitles, handouts) that drops small caps silently collapses Ezekiel’s signature divine title into what reads as a stutter.
• Structural erosion under parallel processing: the book’s central departure-glory (ch.10-11) / return-glory (ch.43) inclusio depends on word-for-word matching German phrasing between two chapters likely processed by different Phase 2 workers.
• Register collapse on “Fürst”: strong translator instinct will pull the future ruler’s deliberately demoted title back toward the more familiar “König,” erasing a small but theologically deliberate authorial choice.

Opportunities

• Two rare, genuinely low-risk positive bridges exist and should be used, not over-engineered: German’s own idiom “ein Herz aus Stein / steinernes Herz” already matches Ezekiel’s stone/flesh-heart contrast exactly, and “etwas übertünchen” already matches the false-prophecy whitewash image.
• German OT scholarship supplies two ready-made, citable technical terms — Erkenntnisformel and Bundesformel — that give this curriculum precise, academically-grounded labels for two of the book’s most pedagogically important recurring patterns, at no translation cost.
• The Berlin Wall provides an unusually apt, positive cultural bridge already logged in this pipeline’s Ephesians package (the “dividing wall” torn down) and can be extended thematically here for the book’s departure/return-of-presence arc, without importing it as a lexical substitute.

Recommended actions

1. Lock the Menschensohn disambiguation protocol before any Phase 2 segment processes — mandatory note at 2:1, recurring at 3:1, 37:3, 37:9 — and treat every occurrence as requiring theologian sign-off, no exceptions.
2. Enforce the two-level Auferstehung note on every Ezekiel 37 occurrence at the template level, not the translator’s discretion, so the corporate-restoration primary sense is structurally guaranteed to appear before any resurrection-hope secondary note.
3. Require automated QA diffing between the ch.10-11 and ch.43 “die Herrlichkeit des HERRN” / “durch das Osttor” phrasing before either chapter is marked complete.
4. Mandate a typography fallback rule for “Herr, HERR” in every non-typeset output path, tested before launch.
5. Add a standing translator self-check for “Fürst” vs. “König” across chs.34, 37, 40-48, and for “Heiden” vs. “Völker/Nationen” across chs.25-32, 35, 38-39, as automated pre-submission linting rules, not review-time catches.
6. Route chs.16 and 23 (marriage-covenant allegory) and Ezekiel 18 (individual responsibility) through mandatory combined theologian + native-speaker tone review before any teaching material ships, given both the pastoral-register risk and the Reformation-doctrine-bleed risk identified above.

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Cross-reference: assets/translation_memory.json (78 terms, this package), assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json (25-doctrine full-book matrix), analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, analysis/04_comparative_theology.md, analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md.