Judges — Executive Summary (Hmong Language Package, Baseline v1.0)

Why it matters

Judges is the single most collision-dense book this pipeline has processed for Hmong to date. Its core passage (2:6-19) and full 21-chapter narrative repeatedly reproduce the exact structural shape of Hmong traditional religion’s own misfortune-and-appeasement cycle, its household/nature-spirit veneration, and its episodic-spirit-favor worldview — not a loose analogy, but a near-exact functional parallel. Left unmanaged, Hmong curriculum content on Judges could be absorbed wholesale into the existing animistic framework rather than understood as the covenant-historical, grace-driven narrative it is. This package extends the Romans baseline TM and requirements without contradiction and gives Phase 2 generation a complete, enforceable term/doctrine control system before any lesson content is written.

Key findings

• 6 doctrines assigned; all 6 rated Critical or High (4 Critical, 2 High) — an even higher-density risk profile than Romans’ already-demanding 10-doctrine set, because Judges’ narrative form (repeating cycles, named foreign deities, household idols, episodic Spirit-empowering) generates more structurally exact traditional-religion parallels than Romans’ more argumentative, epistolary form did.
• 45 terms logged in the Judges term registry, of which 9 are Critical-risk and 17 are High-risk (16 High + 1 Medium-High) — a combined 26 terms requiring mandatory human theologian review before any publication, versus only automated/native-speaker review for the remaining 19 Medium/Low terms.
• 30 wholly new theological terms had no precedent anywhere in the Romans baseline and are now permanently fixed in assets/translation_memory.json (Judges), including two proper-name deity transliterations (Baal, Ashtaroth), one cultic-object transliteration (ephod), and the book’s single fixed doctrinal refrain (“everyone did what was right in his own eyes”).
• 17 Romans-baseline terms are reused verbatim in Judges (God, LORD, Holy Spirit, sin, idol, wrath, salvation, mercy, hardening, worship/serve, promise, heir, kingdom of God, nations, servant/slave, grace, righteousness) — confirming the Romans TM’s design goal of cross-book reusability, though several (Holy Spirit, servant/slave, salvation) require additional, Judges-specific teaching notes beyond what Romans required.
• The single most novel risk in this book, absent from Romans entirely: the Spirit’s episodic, task-specific, and departable empowering pattern (climaxing in Samson’s loss of the Spirit, 16:20), which risks confirming rather than correcting the Hmong hearer’s prior worldview of negotiable, forfeitable spirit-favor — a doctrine-inverting risk that did not exist for this Language Package before Judges was added to the curriculum.

Risks

1. Doctrine 5 (Spirit’s Empowering) inverting Romans’ Union with Christ doctrine if the OT episodic pattern is taught without the mandatory NT-permanence contrast clause — Critical, human theologian, no-exception routing required at every occurrence (3:10, 6:34, 11:29, 13:25, 14:6, 14:19, 15:14, 16:20).
2. Doctrine 4 (Apostasy) being heard as ancient history rather than a live warning, since Baal/Ashtaroth (field/mountain-spirit parallel) and teraphim (household-shrine/xwm kab parallel) are structurally identical to living Hmong practice — Critical.
3. Doctrine 1 (the Cycle) collapsing into the pre-existing shamanic misfortune-appeasement cycle if wrath, the distress-cry, and deliverance are not each individually anchored against ritual-appeasement and soul-rescue readings — Critical.
4. Doctrine 2 (Absence of a Righteous King) being misread as a neutral endorsement of Hmong decentralized clan governance rather than the book’s own indictment — Critical.
5. Jephthah’s rash vow (Doctrine 3) being misread as validating binding ritual vows to spirits/ancestors regardless of consequence — High, with a standing mandatory review flag.
6. The “worse than before” intensifying clause (Doctrine 6) being silently dropped for brevity at any of its six recurrences, flattening a deliberate downward spiral into a static repeating cycle — High.

Opportunities

• Hmong lineage-inheritance custom (qub txeeg qub teg) and debt/redemption idiom already give the covenant-land and grace vocabulary strong, positive cross-cultural footing (2:6, 2:9) with no collision risk.
• The judge-office term (tus Txiav Txim), while requiring a dual-sense teaching note, gives curriculum designers a natural bridge from the familiar tu plaub village dispute-adjudication concept toward the unfamiliar military-deliverer sense.
• The structural exactness of the Baal/teraphim/spirit-favor parallels, while the book’s highest risk, is simultaneously its highest teaching leverage: because the parallel is so precise, contrast-teaching lands with unusual clarity and immediacy compared to more abstract Romans doctrines — this is a rhetorical asset if (and only if) the mandatory contrast-teaching is never omitted.
• Full-book coverage is already complete and internally cross-referenced (all 21 chapters logged, 8 explicitly marked “reviewed — no new dimension” rather than silently skipped), giving Phase 2 generation a clean, gap-free foundation.

Recommended actions

1. Adopt assets/translation_memory.json (Judges) and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md as enforced Phase 2 inputs immediately — no further Phase 1 term discovery is expected; all 45 terms and both new proper-name transliterations are finalized.
2. Route all Phase 2 content touching Doctrines 1, 2, 4, or 5 to mandatory human theologian review with no automated-review bypass, and Doctrines 3 and 6 likewise to human theologian (not merely native-speaker) review, per the doctrine risk registry’s routing rule.
3. Build a standing automated linter check for the five hard-fail patterns most likely to slip through inadvertently: (a) Vaj Ntsuj Plig missing its prefix, (b) bare unqualified pehawm, (c) any hmoov-root token anywhere in a grace, mercy, election, or curse/blessing context, (d) the moral-relativism refrain reproduced with any wording variant, (e) the 16:20 Spirit-departure verse appearing without its NT-contrast clause.
4. Carry the Jephthah-vow and teraphim mandatory-flag requirements into the lesson-authoring template itself (not just the requirements doc) so authors cannot produce a lesson on 11:29-40 or 17-18 without the flag already present in the draft scaffold.
5. Proceed to Phase 2 lesson generation for the core passage (2:6-19) first, since it is the theological hinge for all six doctrines and will surface, in practice, whether the enforcement rules established here function as intended before scaling to the full 21-chapter curriculum.