2 Chronicles — Linguistic Gap Analysis (Hmong Language Package)

0. Purpose and Method

This document performs PRD Phase 1 Step 8 for the 2 Chronicles Hmong Language Package: it (a) builds a doctrine-by-doctrine vocabulary matrix identifying available Hmong terms, their weaknesses, and a recommended handling strategy; (b) distinguishes missing vocabulary (concepts with no existing Hmong lexical slot at all) from crowded semantic neighborhoods (concepts where a single Hmong root is being asked to carry multiple, doctrinally distinct senses and therefore needs deliberate “fencing” — i.e., disambiguating qualifiers, periphrasis, or context-flagging); (c) records transliteration-vs-paraphrase decisions and their rationale; and (d) produces a ranked list of the book’s highest-risk ambiguities for human-theologian triage.

This document does not override any rendering already fixed in the Romans baseline translation_memory.json (permanent) or already logged as provisional in assets/bible_term_registry.json / analysis/08_core_glossary.md for 2 Chronicles. It organizes and extends that material specifically for gap-analysis and fencing purposes, per 12_ai_translation_requirements.md §2.4 and §9’s instruction that new terms be logged rather than silently finalized.

The core passage 2 Chronicles 7:11-22 (Solomon’s night vision; the temple as prayer-house; 7:14’s conditional-blessing formula; the covenant/exile-warning close) is the theological anchor of this package and touches nearly every doctrine below — it is cited throughout as the load-bearing test case for fencing decisions, but full-book coverage (chapters 1-36) governs scope.

---

1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix

1.1 Temple Worship and God’s Presence

Available Hmong Term(s)	Weakness	Recommended Strategy
lub Tuam Tsev ntawm Yawmsaub (temple)	“Tuam Tsev” register overlaps with Buddhist/Chinese temple architecture familiar in the Southeast Asian diaspora context; unqualified use risks a generic-shrine reading.	Mandatory qualifier ntawm Yawmsaub at every occurrence, no exceptions (parallel discipline to Txoj Kevcai ntawm Vajtswv/Mauxes).
qhov chaw rau Yawmsaub lub npe nyob (mus ib txhis) (Name dwelling)	Risks resonance with hu plig (ritual soul-calling/binding) and the household xwm kab ancestor-altar, both of which “anchor” a spirit/soul to a location by human ritual technique.	Teach as God’s own sovereign self-disclosure and covenant-belonging, never as a technique humans perform to bind or localize divine power. First-occurrence footnote mandatory at 7:16 (the pivotal recurrence of the Name-dwelling formula from 6:5-6, 20).
lub yeeb koob (glory)	Stable; inherited from Romans TM.	No additional fencing needed.
chav dawb huv tshaj plaws / muab...cai ua kom dawb huv (Most Holy Place / consecrate)	Shares the dawb huv root also used for personal sanctification (Romans) and ritual purity-from-spirit-contamination in folk practice.	See §2.1 crowded-neighborhood fencing below (dawb huv cluster).
Lub Phij Xab ntawm Kev Cog Lus (Ark)	[TRANSLATOR REVIEW NEEDED] pending confirmation against any pre-existing Hmong Bible tradition rendering.	Confirm before Phase 2; if no prior tradition exists, this provisional compound is retained.
pov thawj (priest)	Some comprehension-level resonance with the shamanic txiv neeb office, but existing Hmong Bible usage already distinguishes them.	Retain; flagged for confirmation only, not fencing.

Doctrinal risk summary: High. The temple is the place doctrine equivalent of what “Vaj Ntsuj Plig” is for personhood in Romans — a location-based collision rather than a person-based one, requiring the same qualifier discipline transferred to a new referent-class.

1.2 Conditional Blessing and National Repentance (2 Chronicles 7:14 core)

Available Hmong Term(s)	Weakness	Recommended Strategy
txo hwv siab (humble oneself)	Deliberately coined distinct from hwjchim (power) to avoid triggering the mandatory divine-power qualifier discipline; low collision risk but genuinely new coinage requiring first-use gloss.	Introduce with explicit gloss at 7:14 first occurrence; reinforce at 12:6-7, 32:26, 33:12,19,23 (each subsequent king’s humbling).
tig rov qab ntawm txoj kev phem / tig ncaim ntawm Yawmsaub (turn — bidirectional root)	Single Hebrew root shuv covers both “turn back to God” (positive) and “turn away from God” (negative, 7:19); Hmong ritual-correction “turning back” (returning to proper ancestral appeasement custom) points the opposite theological direction from what 7:14 intends.	See §2.1 crowded-neighborhood fencing (turn/shuv cluster) — mandatory contrastive pairing, never used unqualified.
nrhiav Yawmsaub lub ntsej muag (seek [His] face)	Reuses “ntsej muag” already present in the Romans TM impartiality-of-God idiom (tsis saib ntsej muag); risk of being heard as seeking a human patron’s favor/audience rather than covenant intimacy.	Brief teaching gloss required at first occurrence (7:14); reinforce distinction from patron-client “face” language used of earthly rulers elsewhere in the book (e.g., before the king, 1:23-24 parallel usage in Kings-tradition material).
zam txim (forgive)	Established Hmong Christian term; risk is under-differentiation from the Critical Romans forensic-justification vocabulary, not collision.	Deliberately kept apart from raug suav tias ncaj ncees; teach as a distinct doctrinal category (national/covenantal forgiveness vs. NT forensic imputation) — see Deliberate Non-Reuse table in 08_core_glossary.md §3.
kho (lub tebchaws) kom zoo (heal the land)	Highest-severity term in this doctrine. Healing is the defining, central function of the Hmong shaman (txiv neeb), consulted precisely to “heal” misfortune through ritual spirit-mediation.	Mandatory two-part anchor at every occurrence: (a) explicitly grounded in prior forgiveness of sin, never presented as an independent ritual-mediation act; (b) explicitly scoped to national/agricultural restoration (crops, drought, plague — 7:13’s triad), never individual therapeutic cure. See ranked list §4, item 1.
Vajtswv lub siab nyiam (will of God) — Romans-inherited but relevant to the conditionality structure	Good idiomatic anchor but risks reading as mere preference; here compounded by the fact that 7:14 is genuinely conditional (“if… then”), a structure absent from most of the Romans package’s unconditional-grace emphasis.	Explicit teaching note: distinguish covenant-nation conditional blessing (7:14, corporate, temporal, land-and-harvest-scoped) from individual, unconditional New Testament grace (Romans TM Critical entry grace) — these must never be taught as the same soteriological mechanism.

Doctrinal risk summary: Critical. This is the core passage’s defining doctrine and combines the book’s single highest-severity collision term (kho...kom zoo) with a genuinely novel theological structure (corporate, conditional, land-scoped blessing) absent from the Romans baseline.

1.3 Faithful and Unfaithful Kings

Available Hmong Term(s)	Weakness	Recommended Strategy
ua raws li Yawmsaub pom zoo / ua phem rau Yawmsaub pom (regnal evaluation formula)	Deliberately NOT merged with Romans’ Critical forensic-justification vocabulary (see Non-Reuse table). Comprehension-level risk only: hearers might import the forensic weight of raug suav tias ncaj ncees into a genre that isn’t making that claim.	Consistently render as a plain descriptive formula; never substitute the Romans justification vocabulary even where “did right” superficially resembles “was reckoned righteous.”
tso Yawmsaub tseg (forsake)	Central diagnostic term; risk is object-ambiguity (interpersonal “leaving” vs. covenantal desertion of God).	God-ward object-marking (Yawmsaub) is structurally mandatory, never a bare verb.
kev fav xeeb rau Yawmsaub (ma’al, treacherous unfaithfulness)	Must be kept lexically distinct from generic txhaum (sin); losing the distinction flattens the book’s most severe charges (Joash killing Zechariah, 24:20-22; Uzziah’s incense usurpation, 26:16) into ordinary wrongdoing.	Reserve exclusively for named acts of sacred-trust betrayal by covenant officeholders; never substitute for ordinary txhaum.
yaj saub (prophet)	Second-highest-severity term in the book. Shares the Saub mythological root with Yawmsaub itself; collides with the shamanic spirit-communication role.	See §2.1 (Saub-root cluster) and ranked list §4, item 2. Leverage the book’s own Micaiah-vs.-400-court-prophets narrative (ch. 18) as the pedagogical contrast anchor.
kev hwm thiab ntshai Yawmsaub (fear of the LORD)	Risks assimilation into fear-driven spirit-appeasement logic dominant in Hmong traditional religion (offerings made specifically to prevent capricious spirit-anger).	Mandatory contrast-teaching: reverent, love-grounded awe of a God who does not need to be placated, anchored to ch. 19’s judicial-integrity context.
kev tso siab rau Yawmsaub (trust/rely)	Narrower than inherited kev ntseeg (faith/believe); crisis-specific reliance rather than general belief.	Retain both terms distinctly; use kev tso siab for acute deliverance narratives (13, 14, 16, 20, 32) and kev ntseeg for the broader believing-relationship sense.

Doctrinal risk summary: High-to-Critical, driven almost entirely by the yaj saub term; the regnal-evaluation and forsake/ma’al vocabulary is comparatively low-collision but requires careful internal fencing to preserve genre distinctions from Romans.

1.4 Reform under Hezekiah and Josiah

Available Hmong Term(s)	Weakness	Recommended Strategy
ntxuav kom huv (cleanse, preparatory) vs. muab...cai ua kom dawb huv (consecrate)	Two-stage cleanse-then-consecrate sequence (29:15-19) has no equivalent distinction need in the Romans package (individual sanctification only); risk is collapsing the two into one term, losing the sequence.	Keep structurally distinct at every occurrence in ch. 29-31, 34-35; teach as sequential (impurity removed, then set apart), not synonymous.
chaw siab (high place)	Context-dependent valence — legitimate at 1:3-13 (pre-temple Gibeon), idolatrous at every later occurrence once the temple is the sole sanctioned site.	Every post-temple occurrence (14, 15, 17, 21, 28, 33, 34) must carry a [TRANSLATOR REVIEW NEEDED: context-dependent valence] flag in any new curriculum content until a permanent disambiguation convention (e.g., a fixed “idolatrous high place” qualifier phrase) is adopted in Phase 2 TM-revision.
phau Ntawv Txoj Kevcai (Book of the Law)	Compound of two already-flagged roots (Txoj Kevcai + Vaj Lug Kub scripture register); both mandatory qualifiers must co-occur.	Never abbreviate to a bare “phau ntawv” (a book) or bare “Txoj Kevcai” without its qualifier, even in space-constrained contexts (per Romans §2.2 structural-qualifier rule, extended here).
Kevcai Hla Dhau (Passover), Kevcai Tsev Ntaub (Booths)	Reuse the flagged kevcai root shared with the Romans baptism/circumcision collision pattern; comprehension gap, not doctrinal collision, since both are divinely commanded rites.	No fencing required beyond a first-use explanatory gloss; do not treat as equivalent risk to Txoj Kevcai itself.
twv lus (oath-swearing/covenant renewal)	Positive cultural resonance with Hmong customary oath-taking; comprehension-level only.	Use as a positive teaching bridge; no collision fencing needed.

Doctrinal risk summary: Medium-High, driven mainly by the chaw siab valence-flip and the Txoj Kevcai compound-qualifier discipline; comparatively low collision risk overall since reform vocabulary reuses largely stable roots.

1.5 The Exile as Covenant Consequence

Available Hmong Term(s)	Weakness	Recommended Strategy
kev npau taws ntawm Vajtswv (wrath of God)	Inherited High-risk Romans term; same collision class (capricious spirit-anger vs. righteous judicial anger).	Retain baseline contrast-teaching requirement without modification.
raug ntes coj mus rau lwm tebchaws (exile/captivity)	Double-edged asset: strong positive comprehension-resonance with actual Hmong refugee/displacement history risks generalizing a specific covenantal judgment into either universalized “any displaced people’s suffering” or impersonal hmoov (fate).	Mandatory anchoring: teach as judgment for a specific, named cause (persistent covenant unfaithfulness, 36:14-16), never as generalized fate or a template for interpreting all displacement/refugee experience theologically. This requires particular pastoral sensitivity given the audience’s lived history — see ranked list §4, item 3.
kev fav xeeb (ma’al) — reused from Faithful/Unfaithful Kings doctrine	Same fencing requirement as §1.3.	Cross-reference; no new fencing needed.
kev so (ntawm lub tebchaws) (Sabbath of the land, determining exile’s 70-year duration)	Comprehension-level only.	Useful teaching point: even judgment operates within God’s ordered covenant purposes, not arbitrary duration — reinforces against a fatalistic reading of exile.

Doctrinal risk summary: High, driven by the tension between exile’s genuine comprehension-bridge value (refugee resonance) and the risk of that same resonance flattening covenantal specificity into generalized fatalism.

1.6 Hope of Restoration

Available Hmong Term(s)	Weakness	Recommended Strategy
kev rov qab los (restoration/return)	Positive bridge-term with resonance to Hmong diaspora longing for homeland-return; risk is under-teaching (not collision) that this is covenant-fulfillment, not mere political repatriation.	Parallel the “positive bridge, low collision, under-teaching risk” pattern already modeled by Romans TM heir/adoption_as_sons; explicit teaching note required.
cov seem (remnant)	Inherited, stable, no collision.	No fencing needed.
ntsuj plig (Cyrus’s human spirit, 36:22)	Must never receive the “Vaj” prefix; God’s sovereign external stirring of a pagan king’s own resolve is not the indwelling Holy Spirit.	Reinforce the Romans-baseline fencing discipline (Vaj Ntsuj Plig vs. bare ntsuj plig) at this specific, doctrinally sensitive occurrence — a pagan ruler is the referent, raising the stakes of a slip.
txiaj ntsim (grace, Cyrus’s favor)	Inherited Critical term; koob hmoov permanently forbidden.	No new fencing; reaffirm baseline prohibition at this climactic final occurrence in the book.
lub Nceeg Vaj (ntawm Vajtswv) (kingdom typology)	Under-teaching risk regarding the political-Davidic-throne vs. ultimate-messianic-kingdom referent distinction.	Explicit forward-pointing teaching note connecting the collapse of the Davidic throne (36:1-21) to its restoration hope, without conflating the political and eschatological senses.

Doctrinal risk summary: Medium-High. Comparatively lower collision risk than doctrines 2, 3, 5 above; the primary task is theological under-teaching prevention (ensuring restoration reads as covenant fulfillment) rather than active collision-fencing.

---

2. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods

2.1 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing

These are cases where one Hmong root is being asked to carry two or more doctrinally distinct senses, creating risk of unintended conflation unless explicitly fenced.

(a) The Saub root cluster — Yawmsaub / yaj saub

• Yawmsaub (the covenant Name YHWH) and yaj saub (prophet) share the mythological Saub root from Hmong oral tradition (the flood-narrative high-deity figure).
• Fencing strategy: Yawmsaub is reserved exclusively for the covenant God; yaj saub is reserved exclusively for an authorized human spokesman of that God, and must always be taught in explicit contrast to txiv neeb (shaman) and to the condemned mediums/necromancers (registry #37/glossary “sorcery” entry). The book’s own internal true/false-prophet contrast (ch. 18, Micaiah vs. the 400) is the mandated pedagogical anchor for this fence, since Chronicles itself polices the boundary the Hmong lexicon cannot.
• Escalation: any future curriculum content introducing a third Saub-root compound (e.g., for “vision,” “seer,” or “man of God” — Hebrew ish ha-elohim, used of prophetic figures elsewhere in Kings/Chronicles source material) must be flagged [TRANSLATOR REVIEW NEEDED: Saub-root proliferation] before adoption, since each additional compound increases collision surface with the shamanic-mediumship domain.

(b) The dawb huv (holy/pure) root cluster

• Carries: personal sanctification (Romans-inherited), Most Holy Place (chav dawb huv tshaj plaws), temple consecration (muab...cai ua kom dawb huv), and is deliberately distinguished from the newly added preparatory-cleansing term ntxuav kom huv.
• Fencing strategy: maintain the two-tier vocabulary (cleanse = removal of defilement, a process term; dawb huv = the resulting consecrated/holy state, a status term) rigorously across ch. 3, 7, 26, 29-31, 34. Uzziah’s leprosy narrative (ch. 26) functions as the didactic case showing the architecture of graduated holiness this cluster protects — a violation of the boundary between “outside” and “dawb huv tshaj plaws” produces the narrative’s central judgment. Losing the cleanse/consecrate distinction flattens this architecture.

(c) The fij (sacrifice/offering) root cluster

• Carries: legitimate temple sacrifice (kev hlawv xyeem / khoom fij), the New-Testament-pointing “living sacrifice” concept (Romans-inherited, not directly present in 2 Chronicles but relevant for cross-curriculum consistency), Christ’s atonement (Romans propitiation_atoning_sacrifice, likewise cross-referenced), the ethically neutral term must also bear the weight of the book’s most severe apostasy — child sacrifice (hlawv...ua khoom fij rau dab mlom) — and shares surface form with folk fij dab (spirit-appeasement offering).
• Fencing strategy: every occurrence of any fij-family term must be explicitly marked as one of exactly three categories: (i) legitimate, temple-sanctioned sacrifice pointing forward to Christ; (ii) the historically specific, condemned act of child sacrifice to a foreign deity (28, 33) — never generalized into a caricature of Hmong ancestral religion, which has no equivalent practice; or (iii) generic fij dab spirit-appeasement, always named as the rejected category. No occurrence may be left in category-ambiguous form.

(d) The hwjchim (power) root — and its deliberate avoidance in humility vocabulary

• Romans-inherited hwjchim (always qualified Vajtswv hwjchim) is reused for deliverance narratives (13, 14, 20, 32) and governing authority. The glossary’s new coinage txo hwv siab (humble oneself, 7:14) was deliberately built as a non-cognate term specifically so that the required humility-response in 7:14 would not accidentally invoke the divine-power qualifier discipline (which would produce an incoherent “humble yourself in God’s power” reading).
• Fencing strategy: confirm txo hwv siab remains phonologically and lexically unrelated to hwjchim in all future Phase 2 generation; this is a successful pre-emptive fence already built into the glossary and should not be altered.

(e) The shuv (turn) bidirectional root

• The single Hebrew root underlies both 7:14’s positive “turn back” (to covenant faithfulness) and 7:19’s negative “turn away” (to apostasy), and also underlies the restoration “return” of the exiles (36, kev rov qab los, itself a shuv-derived form in Hebrew, ha'olim/return).
• Fencing strategy: never render any shuv-derived occurrence with a single unqualified Hmong verb; always pair the verb with an explicit directional/object phrase (ntawm txoj kev phem, ntawm Yawmsaub, or the restoration-specific los [return, homeward]) so that direction is never ambiguous. This is structurally identical to the Romans-baseline wrath_of_god/idol “must always be taught as a contrastive pair” pattern.

(f) kevcai (rite/custom) root — Law, Passover, Booths, and the ancestral-custom collision

• Inherited from Romans as a Critical fencing case (Txoj Kevcai vs. kev cai dab qhuas); 2 Chronicles multiplies the surface forms sharing this root (Kevcai Hla Dhau, Kevcai Tsev Ntaub, and implicitly the covenant-renewal oath ceremonies).
• Fencing strategy: only Txoj Kevcai (capitalized, referring to the Mosaic/divine Law as a body) requires the mandatory (ntawm Vajtswv / Mauxes) qualifier under the structural-qualifier rule; the festival names (Kevcai Hla Dhau, Kevcai Tsev Ntaub) are comprehension-gap-only compounds and do not require the same qualifier, since they name specific commanded rites rather than risking conflation with generic ancestral-custom religion in the same way the bare abstract noun does. This distinction should be explicitly logged so future curriculum writers do not either (i) over-qualify festival names unnecessarily or (ii) under-qualify the abstract Law noun.

(g) chesed / grace / mercy triad

• txoj kev hlub ruaj khov (ntawm Vajtswv) (chesed), txiaj ntsim (grace, Romans-inherited Critical), and txoj kev khuv leej (mercy, Romans-inherited Medium) are three theologically distinct concepts that Hmong lacks three natively distinct terms for — all three cluster around a general “God is good toward the undeserving” semantic space.
• Fencing strategy: reserve txiaj ntsim strictly for unmerited favor toward the guilty (Cyrus’s decree, 36:22-23); txoj kev khuv leej strictly for compassion toward the miserable/afflicted (30:9); and the newly coined txoj kev hlub ruaj khov strictly for covenant-loyalty-despite-unfaithfulness (the liturgical refrain at 5:13, 7:3, 20:21). No two of the three may be used interchangeably even though English translations sometimes gloss all three as “mercy” or “love.” This is a doctrinal-blending risk, not a traditional-religion collision, but requires equally firm fencing.

2.2 Genuinely Missing Vocabulary (no existing Hmong lexical slot)

• Corporate/national repentance as a single act of the people rather than an individual. Hmong has robust individual-confession and individual-restitution vocabulary but no single fixed term for a nation corporately humbling itself, turning, and being forgiven as a unit (7:14’s “my people”). The glossary’s solution — chaining txo hwv siab + nrhiav Yawmsaub + tig rov qab + zam txim as a fixed four-part sequence rather than seeking a single compound noun — is the recommended approach; no single-word coinage should be attempted, since forcing one risks an artificial neologism with no natural resonance.
• Conditional dynastic covenant with an unconditional dynastic-line guarantee held in tension. The Davidic covenant’s dual structure (individual reign conditioned on obedience, 7:17-18; dynastic line survival unconditionally guaranteed, cf. 21:7) has no single Hmong term; it is currently handled correctly through the kev cog lus/lus cog tseg lexical distinction (covenant-bond vs. specific promised content) established in the glossary, but this remains a teaching-note-dependent resolution, not a lexical one, and should be flagged for a dedicated first-occurrence footnote at 7:17-18 in Phase 2 content.
• Graduated architectural holiness (courtyard → holy place → Most Holy Place) as a spatial system. Hmong religious space is not organized into graduated holiness zones in this way (traditional spirit-shrine space is binary: sacred/ordinary, not graduated). The dawb huv tshaj plaws superlative construction is a workable paraphrase but there is no missing single term to coin here — this is a conceptual/comprehension gap best handled with a diagram or explanatory note in curriculum materials, not additional vocabulary.
• A single term distinguishing “prophet who is wrong/false” from “prophet who is a fraud/medium.” The book’s ch. 18 narrative (Micaiah vs. the 400) requires distinguishing a true prophet giving an unwelcome true message from court prophets giving a false message under royal pressure from mediums/necromancers practicing forbidden divination (ch. 33) — three distinct categories. Hmong currently has vocabulary only for the third (via the sorcery/mediums registry entry). The first two categories must currently be handled through descriptive phrasing (e.g., “tus yaj saub uas hais lus tseeb” / “cov yaj saub uas hais lus dag”) rather than fixed single terms; recommend logging this as a Phase 2 TM-revision candidate rather than leaving it to be improvised per-lesson.

---

3. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions

Term	Decision	Rationale
Yawmsaub (YHWH)	Transliteration-adjacent (adoption of existing Hmong Bible tradition term built on the Saub root, not a phonetic transliteration of the Hebrew)	Follows established Hmong Bible tradition precedent (structurally parallel to the Romans baseline’s decision to keep Abba as a retained loanword-plus-gloss); rejected alternatives would be (a) a phonetic transliteration (“Yehauvas”-style), explicitly forbidden per the Romans baseline’s sectarian-vocabulary prohibition (NWT divine-name substitution pattern), or (b) collapsing into generic Vajtswv, which would erase the text’s deliberate Name/title distinction at 7:12, 7:14, 7:16.
Khelunpees (Cherubim)	Transliteration	No native or borrowed Hmong equivalent exists for this specific class of guardian figure; comprehension gap only, transliteration is the standard low-risk solution already used for Yexus Khetos, Povlauj in the Romans baseline.
Kevcai Hla Dhau (Passover), Kevcai Tsev Ntaub (Booths)	Paraphrase (descriptive compound), not transliteration	Consistent with the Romans baseline’s decision to render baptisma as the native compound kev cai raus dej rather than a transliterated loanword — the baseline’s explicit reasoning (“sidesteps rather than resolves the kevcai collision and cuts the term from existing Hmong Christian usage”) applies identically here; paraphrase keeps the festival names embedded in the living Hmong Christian ritual-vocabulary tradition rather than isolating them as foreign loanwords.
qhov theej txhoj kev txhaum-style atonement vocabulary (cross-referenced from Romans, relevant to fij cluster)	Paraphrase, inherited	Reaffirms Romans baseline’s rejection of a transliterated loanword for hilastērion; same logic extends to 2 Chronicles’ sacrificial vocabulary.
pov thawj (priest)	Paraphrase (existing native term), not transliteration	Existing Hmong Christian usage already supplies a stable term; no comprehension gap requiring transliteration exists here, unlike Cherubim.
Lub Phij Xab ntawm Kev Cog Lus (Ark of the Covenant)	Paraphrase (descriptive compound), pending confirmation	[TRANSLATOR REVIEW NEEDED] — if an established Hmong Bible tradition rendering already exists (as it does for Yawmsaub), that should supersede this provisional compound; if not, the descriptive-compound approach (parallel to lub Tuam Tsev ntawm Yawmsaub) is retained rather than a transliteration, since “Ark” itself is not a proper name requiring phonetic preservation.
yaj saub (prophet)	Paraphrase (existing native term reused from established tradition), not fresh transliteration	Retains existing Hmong Bible tradition vocabulary despite its collision risk (§2.1a), because inventing a new transliterated term (e.g., a loanword for “navi”) would sever this book’s teaching from the wider existing Hmong Bible corpus’s prophetic vocabulary, creating a worse cross-curriculum inconsistency than the collision risk it would resolve. The collision is managed by contrast-teaching, not by lexical avoidance.
Regnal evaluation formula (ua raws li Yawmsaub pom zoo / ua phem rau Yawmsaub pom)	Paraphrase (full descriptive clause), deliberately not compressed into a fixed single compound noun	A single-noun coinage risked accidentally resembling the Romans forensic-justification compound; the deliberately verbose, clearly verbal-clause form keeps this formula visibly distinct in both form and register from raug suav tias ncaj ncees.

General principle guiding all decisions above: transliteration is reserved for (a) proper names with no native referent (Cherubim) or (b) established prior Hmong Bible tradition forms already fixed by precedent (Yawmsaub, Yexus Khetos-class names); paraphrase/native-compound is preferred wherever a native descriptive phrase can carry the sense without either creating a foreign-sounding isolate term or triggering a worse collision than the one it would avoid — consistent with the Romans baseline’s own stated preference (baptism, propitiation) for resolving rather than sidestepping collisions.

---

4. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities

Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × collision specificity × likelihood of occurring in generated content) for human-theologian triage priority.

1. kho (lub tebchaws) kom zoo — “heal the land” (7:14). Highest risk in the book: sits at the doctrinal center of the core passage, and collides with the single most defining function of the Hmong shaman (txiv neeb). An unqualified rendering could be heard as “God performs the shaman’s healing function, only more powerfully” — inverting rather than displacing the traditional-religion category. Mandatory dual anchor (prior forgiveness; national/agricultural scope) required at every occurrence; escalate to human theologian without exception.

2. yaj saub — “prophet.” Shares the Saub mythological root with the divine Name itself and collides with the shamanic spirit-communication role; occurs across eight+ chapters (18, 21, 24, 25, 33, 34, 35, 36) with the ch. 18 Micaiah narrative as the highest-density risk passage, since it stages a true-prophet-vs.-false-prophet contest that a hearer already primed to associate yaj saub with txiv neeb-style spirit consultation could badly misread. Mandatory human theologian + native-speaker review, per existing registry flag.

3. raug ntes coj mus rau lwm tebchaws — “exile” combined with kev npau taws ntawm Vajtswv — “wrath of God” (ch. 36). The risk here is inverted from the typical pattern: rather than an unfamiliar concept colliding with a familiar one, a too-familiar concept (the audience’s own refugee/displacement history) risks over-identification, generalizing a specific covenantal judgment into either universal displaced-peoples theology or fatalistic hmoov-adjacent thinking. Requires unusually careful pastoral framing given the audience’s lived experience; escalate to human theologian with explicit attention to pastoral sensitivity, not only doctrinal accuracy.

4. kev ua neeb ua yaig thiab nrog cov dab tham — sorcery/mediums/necromancers (ch. 33). Direct textual overlap with contemporary Hmong shamanic practice terminology; already flagged Critical in the registry with mandatory dual review. Ranked below items 1-3 only because the text’s own explicit condemnation-plus-Manasseh’s-restoration framing gives more built-in interpretive guardrails than items 1-3 possess.

5. hlawv (nws tus tub) ua khoom fij rau dab mlom — child sacrifice (28, 33). Severe pastoral-framing risk (must not caricature Hmong ancestral religion, which has no equivalent practice) combined with proximity to the legitimate-sacrifice vocabulary cluster (§2.1c); ranked below item 4 because the practice itself has no living Hmong analogue to collide with (the risk is caricature/offense, not doctrinal collision proper).

6. chaw siab — “high place,” context-dependent valence flip. Not a traditional-religion collision but a structural translation hazard: the identical term is legitimate at 1:3-13 and idolatrous at every later occurrence (14, 15, 17, 21, 28, 33, 34); a single missed valence-flag could silently invert the text’s own judgment at any of seven later chapters.

7. kev fav xeeb rau Yawmsaub (ma’al) vs. txhaum (sin) — under-fencing risk. Not a collision but a flattening risk: losing this distinction erases the book’s sharpest moral category (sacred-trust betrayal by officeholders) into generic wrongdoing, weakening the Faithful/Unfaithful Kings doctrine’s most severe case studies (Joash, Uzziah, Manasseh, final generation at 36:14).

8. qhov chaw rau Yawmsaub lub npe nyob — Name-dwelling theology (2, 6, 7). Risks resonance with hu plig soul-calling and xwm kab ancestor-altar-anchoring; ranked here rather than higher because the risk is teachable through a single well-placed footnote at first occurrence (7:16) rather than requiring per-occurrence vigilance.

9. Txoj Kevcai compound-qualifier discipline extended to phau Ntawv Txoj Kevcai (Book of the Law, ch. 34). Inherits the Romans-baseline Critical fencing requirement; ranked here because the compound form (Law + Scripture) creates two simultaneous qualifier obligations that must both survive any abbreviation pressure in curriculum formatting (headers, quiz options).

10. txoj kev hlub ruaj khov / txiaj ntsim / txoj kev khuv leej triad (chesed/grace/mercy). Ranked lowest of the top-tier risks because this is a doctrinal-blending risk internal to the theological vocabulary system rather than a collision with an external competing religious framework; nonetheless significant because the liturgical refrain (5:13, 7:3, 20:21) recurs at the book’s most climactic worship moments, where doctrinal precision matters disproportionately.

---

5. Full-Book Coverage Confirmation

This gap analysis draws on load-bearing vocabulary spanning chapters 1-36. Chapters previously logged in analysis/07_semantic_analysis.md §2 and analysis/08_core_glossary.md §5 as contributing no new load-bearing terms (4, 8, 11, 17, 21, 25, 27, 35) are hereby re-confirmed as reviewed for gap-analysis purposes as well: none introduce a crowded-neighborhood conflict, a missing-vocabulary gap, or a transliteration decision not already accounted for above. This satisfies the full-book-coverage mandate without requiring separate per-chapter entries for chapters contributing no new fencing decisions.

---

6. Governing Note

This document is a Phase 1 analysis deliverable and does not itself finalize any TM entry. All provisional renderings referenced above remain subject to the formal TM-revision review process specified in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md §2.4 and §9 before any Critical- or High-risk term identified here becomes a permanent, unchangeable Phase 2 rendering. Fencing strategies recommended in §2.1 should be encoded as structural qualifier rules (parallel to the Romans baseline’s §2.2 qualifier-phrase enforcement table) in the Phase 2 12_ai_translation_requirements.md revision for 2 Chronicles.