Joshua — Hmong Language Package: Executive Summary

Why it matters

Joshua’s covenant-renewal climax (Joshua 24:14-15) commands Israel to “put away the gods your fathers served” — and for a Hmong audience, that is not an ancient abstraction. It names, with unusual directness, the living practice of ancestral and household spirit-service (pehawm dab, the xwm kab spirit-shelf) still present in Hmong family and clan life today. This curriculum’s single highest-value opportunity is also its single highest-risk translation unit: get it right, and the gospel’s call to exclusive covenant loyalty lands with full force; get it wrong — by softening, generalizing, or mishandling the ancestor/spirit-service distinction — and the passage’s central appeal is lost or, worse, heard as an attack on family and lineage itself.

Key findings

• 68 total terms are now fixed in the Joshua Translation Memory: 24 inherited unmodified from the Romans baseline, 44 newly surfaced across full-book coverage of all 24 chapters.
• 25 terms carry Critical or High doctrine_risk (8 Critical, 17 High) — roughly one in three terms in the package — reflecting Joshua’s unusually dense concentration of collision points with Hmong animism, ancestor veneration, shamanism (txiv neeb), and the fate/fortune concept (hmoov).
• All 7 assigned doctrines are High or Critical risk (2 Critical: Holy War and Divine Judgment, Covenant Renewal at Shechem; 5 High: Land Promise, Courage, Rahab/Inclusion, Obedience, Rest-as-Type) — there is no Low/Medium-risk doctrine in this package, mirroring the Romans baseline’s own all-High/Critical doctrine profile.
• Two genuinely new vocabulary gaps (not merely collision risks) were identified that never arose in Romans: cherem (devoted-to-destruction judgment) and berith (bilateral, oath-sealed covenant, distinct from unilateral promise) — both required inventing new Hmong periphrastic compounds from scratch.
• Full 24-chapter coverage confirmed: chapters 12 and 15-19 are explicitly logged as contributing no new doctrinal/theological vocabulary rather than silently skipped, per the PRD’s full-book-coverage mandate.

Risks

• Cherem (Holy War doctrine) has no native Hmong lexical equivalent and risks double misassimilation: into the sacrificial-offering (fij) domain, or into shamanic ritual spirit-combat (ua neeb tuag rog) — either reading sacralizes violence as repeatable technique rather than unique judicial judgment. Highest-risk term in the book.
• “Other gods” (24:14-15) collides directly and intentionally with Hmong ancestral/household spirit-service — the inverse risk profile from every other entry in this package: the danger is smoothing over the collision, not causing it.
• Berith vs. promise is a structural gap inherited from Romans’ silence on this distinction; without careful fencing, the Covenant Renewal doctrine’s bilateral/unilateral logic collapses.
• The human “choose” (24:15) risks activating the Romans package’s fixed, Critical-risk divine-election formula if rendered carelessly, conflating human covenantal responsibility with God’s sovereign choice of persons.
• Courage-and-presence, cherem, and pehawm all depend on strict structural co-occurrence rules (courage never without presence; cherem never without its teaching-note anchor; pehawm never without its object) — enforcement discipline, not word choice, is the primary failure mode.

Opportunities

• Rahab (ch.2) offers the cleanest doctrinal vocabulary in the book — no forced collisions — and a strong, ready-made bridge to Romans’ Jew/Gentile inclusion argument.
• Land-inheritance and household-authority vocabulary map unusually well onto genuine, positive Hmong cultural values (lineage inheritance, oath-keeping, clan-head religious authority), giving several doctrines strong rhetorical footing when properly anchored to God’s covenantal grant rather than left to drift toward ancestral-land veneration.
• Corporate solidarity in Achan’s sin (ch.7) reinforces, rather than complicates, the Critical-risk federal-headship teaching already established for Romans’ Original Sin doctrine — a valuable cross-Testament teaching bridge available to curriculum writers.

Recommended actions

1. Route all content touching Doctrine 2 (Holy War) or Doctrine 5 (Covenant Renewal at Shechem) — and any of the 8 Critical-risk terms — through mandatory human theologian review with no automated-review bypass, per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json.
2. Prioritize formal TM-revision ratification for the four highest-downstream-risk new terms before Phase 2 generation begins: cherem_devoted_to_destruction, covenant_berith, captain_of_the_lords_host, and chesed_covenant_loyalty.
3. Enforce the three new structural atomic-unit rules (courage+presence, cherem+teaching-note, pehawm+object density in 24:14-15) identically across every lesson, footnote, and quiz — no stylistic exceptions.
4. Preserve, never soften, the deliberate collision in Joshua 24:14 between “the gods your fathers served” and living Hmong ancestral spirit-service; pair every occurrence with the explicit ancestors-as-persons-vs-spirit-service distinction.
5. Apply the documented structural exception for kev cawm dim/cities of refuge (ch.20): flag as OT type only, never anchor to Yexus Khetos, to avoid both anachronism and inadvertent violation of the Romans baseline’s mandatory Christ-anchor rule.