Nahum — Linguistic Gap Analysis (Hmong Language Package)

0. Purpose and Method

This document performs PRD Phase 1 Step 8 for the Nahum Hmong Language Package: it maps where the Hmong lexicon (RPA script, formal/literary register, Vajtswv Txoj Lus tradition) is missing vocabulary Nahum needs, where it is crowded — i.e. offers a term already claimed by traditional religion, by the Romans baseline TM, or by another Nahum sense — and therefore requires an explicit fencing strategy, and where the correct move is transliteration rather than paraphrase. It closes with a ranked list of the letter’s highest-risk ambiguities for escalation into assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json and 12_ai_translation_requirements.md equivalents at Phase 2.

The core passage, Nahum 1:1-8, is the theological anchor of this analysis (it contains the densest concentration of Critical/High items: #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #27, #28), but full-book coverage (chapters 1-3) is maintained throughout, consistent with the PRD mandate. Chapters/sections contributing no new gap beyond what is already logged are explicitly marked “reviewed, no new gap” rather than omitted.

All risk tiers below reuse the Romans-baseline definitions (Critical / High / Medium / Low) unchanged. All Hmong strings reproduce analysis/08_core_glossary.md and assets/bible_term_registry.json exactly; this document adds no new renderings, only gap analysis and fencing strategy.

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1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix

For each of the four assigned doctrines, this matrix lists: the available Hmong terms/phrases currently proposed, their specific weaknesses, and the recommended mitigation strategy carried forward into Phase 2 instructions.

D1 — The Justice and Wrath of God against Oppressors

Available Hmong Term(s)	Source Concept	Weakness	Recommended Strategy
kev npau taws ntawm Vajtswv (reused Romans TM)	chemah/za’am/charon aph — wrath cluster	Bare npau taws in Hmong is the identical verb for capricious ancestor/nature-spirit anger, provoked by ritual neglect and removable by sacrifice.	Reuse Romans mandatory contrast-teaching unchanged; extend explicitly to Nahum’s “poured out like fire” imagery (#15) so the fire-image does not get read as a spirit’s curse.
kev pauj taub (raws li Vajtswv txoj kev ncaj ncees...)	naqam/noqem — vengeance	Hmong clan-honor custom recognizes legitimate retaliatory “pauj” (repayment-in-kind) for insult/injury; a bare rendering risks validating blood-feud ethics as continuous with divine justice.	Mandatory qualifier clause enforced as a single atomic unit (same structural rule as Romans’ hwjchim→Vajtswv hwjchim); never permit bare pauj or pauj taub for this sense.
Vajtswv yeej yuav tsis zam txim rau tus muaj txim	naqeh lo yenaqeh	If the emphatic double-verb force is lost in paraphrase (i.e., rendered as a flat “God punishes sin”), the doctrine’s judicial certainty collapses into generic moralism.	Fix as an atomic clause; forbid any reduction to single-clause “Vajtswv rau txim” without the “yeej yuav tsis zam txim” emphatic frame.
koj txoj kev limhiam uas tsis paub tas (continual evil, ch.3)	ra’atkha tamid	Risk of collapsing Nahum’s specific charge (habitual, unrepented oppression) into Romans’ distinct universal-guilt doctrine (txhaum/kev txhaum), which is broader and individual/inherited rather than corporate-and-habitual.	Teaching note required: Nahum’s guilt-ground is corporate, habitual, oppressor-specific wickedness — not a restatement of Romans 3:23’s universal guilt. Keep doctrinal scope distinct even though both use the general txhaum/limhiam word-family.
dab mlom (idol, reused Romans TM)	pesel u-massekhah	None beyond the Romans baseline’s own High-risk profile (correct term, but doctrinally weighty).	Reuse unchanged; no new fencing needed for Nahum.

Gap identified: Hmong has no single lexeme distinguishing “vengeance reserved exclusively to God” from ordinary clan retaliatory “pauj.” This is a crowded neighborhood, not a missing-vocabulary gap — see §3.2.

D2 — God’s Sovereignty over Nineveh and Assyria

Available Hmong Term(s)	Source Concept	Weakness	Recommended Strategy
tus Tswv uas Kav Cov Tub Rog Saum Ntuj Ceeb Tsheej	YHWH Tzeva’ot	Descriptive compound risks being heard as “a very powerful spirit-general,” continuous with a txiv neeb’s invoked spirit-army, rather than the unique Creator-Commander of all reality.	Mandatory explicit contrast-teaching at first occurrence in every module: God does not summon an army the way a shaman does; the “hosts” are already, eternally, his own.
Vajtswv hwjchim (loj kawg nkaus) (reused Romans TM)	gadol koach	Identical High-risk profile to Romans’ power/dynamis entry: bare hwjchim = shamanic ritual power.	Reuse Romans qualifier rule unchanged: never bare.
tus tuaj ua rau puas tsuaj (the Shatterer)	mephitz	Low collision, but doctrinally significant: a pagan army as God’s sovereign instrument. Risk is under-teaching, not collision.	Add explicit note: God’s sovereignty extends to directing even godless armies/nations as instruments, paralleling Romans 13’s “governing authorities” doctrine (already High-risk in the Romans TM) — cross-reference recommended, not a lexical fix.
tsov ntxhuav (lion, Assyria-as-predator)	ari/kephir/me’on arayot	Comprehension gap: lions absent from Hmong homeland fauna.	Bridge via existing Hmong tiger (tsov) folklore register — NOT a doctrinal fencing issue, a cultural-bridge footnote only.
Sea/rivers/mountains/rocks cluster (#35, #38, #41)	yam/naharot/harim/tzurim	No collision; but risk of being read as generic nature-poetry rather than a specific echo of Exodus/Sinai theophany, muting the Sovereignty-over-history (not just nature) claim.	Recommend a cross-reference teaching note connecting the theophany imagery to God’s historical acts (Exodus, Sinai), not treating vv.3-6 as detached nature imagery.

Gap identified: No existing Hmong idiom captures “sovereign providential use of a pagan/godless instrument to accomplish righteous judgment” without either (a) implying divine endorsement of the instrument’s own wickedness, or (b) reducing to mere permission/foreknowledge. This is a genuine missing-vocabulary gap — see §2.1.

D3 — Comfort for the Oppressed

Available Hmong Term(s)	Source Concept	Weakness	Recommended Strategy
lub chaw ruaj khov (stronghold/refuge)	ma’oz	Direct collision with protective amulets/charms (khawv koob) and guardian-spirit invocation, both specifically framed as protection “in the day of trouble.”	Mandatory God-anchored full-sentence rendering at every occurrence: “tus Tswv yog peb lub chaw ruaj khov” — never a bare noun phrase.
cov uas cawm siab rau nws (take refuge/trust)	chosei (chasah)	Deliberately built on the cawm root shared with Romans’ Christologically-anchored salvation_save entry, but must not be merged with that fixed TM entry (which mandates a Yexus Khetos anchor inappropriate to a pre-incarnation text).	Flagged [TRANSLATOR REVIEW NEEDED] in the prior registry; this analysis recommends resolving it via a documented typological bridge note rather than lexical merger — see §4.3.
tus qhia Txoj Moo Zoo thiab tshaj tawm kev thaj yeeb (herald formula)	mevaser mashmia shalom	None; both halves reused exactly from Romans TM (gospel, peace).	Reuse unchanged; recommend explicit Nahum 1:15 ↔ Romans 10:15 ↔ Isaiah 52:7 cross-reference teaching note to maximize doctrinal coherence across the curriculum library.
cov uas yuav nplig siab (comforters, absent for Nineveh)	menachamim	Register-level only; no collision.	Pair pedagogically with 1:7’s refuge promise as an intentional ironic reversal — teaching note, not lexical fix.
koj tej lus cog tseg rau Vajtswv (vows)	nedarayikh	Shares surface phrasing with Romans’ promise entry but reverses direction (human→God vs. God→human).	Explicit direction-reversal flag in every teaching note referencing this term alongside the Romans promise entry.

Gap identified: The chosei/chasah (#28) item is the most significant unresolved cross-Testament policy question in the whole package — neither a missing-vocabulary gap nor a simple crowded-neighborhood collision, but a TM-governance gap: should pre-incarnation “refuge in YHWH” ever be permitted to gesture toward the Romans-fixed Christological salvation vocabulary, and if so, how? See §4.3 and Ranked Ambiguity #2 below.

D4 — God as Slow to Anger yet Just

Available Hmong Term(s)	Source Concept	Weakness	Recommended Strategy
Vajtswv ua siab ntev, tsis ceev npau taws (slow to anger)	erek appayim	Built on the Romans endurance root (kev ua siab ntev), which in Romans describes human patient perseverance; applying the same root to describe God’s patience risks under-distinguishing the two very different subjects (human virtue vs. divine attribute) if not flagged.	Teaching note: this is God’s own forbearance, not human hypomonē; same surface root, different theological subject — do not conflate with the Romans endurance doctrine.
Vajtswv yeej yuav tsis zam txim rau tus muaj txim (will not clear the guilty)	naqeh lo yenaqeh	See D1 above — this is the doctrinal hinge; the single highest-stakes phrase in the letter, because it must be held in tension with, not contradiction to, the “slow to anger” clause.	Structural pairing rule: #7 and #8 must always co-occur within the same teaching unit; never present one without the other. This mirrors Romans’ righteousness_of_god ↔ justify_reckon_as_righteous pairing convention exactly.
zoo (good, 1:7 pivot)	tov	Low risk lexically, but high risk structurally: if 1:7 (“The LORD is good”) is taught in isolation from 1:2-6 (wrath) and 1:8 (destruction of enemies), hearers may conclude Nahum contains two incompatible gods.	Mandatory literary-structure teaching note: 1:2-8 is a single unbroken theological unit; zoo must always be taught as continuous with, not a correction of, the wrath-cluster.

No missing-vocabulary gap identified for D4 — the challenge here is entirely one of structural/pedagogical fencing (keeping paired clauses paired), not lexical availability. This is itself a notable finding: D4’s translation risk is almost entirely a discourse-management problem rather than a word-choice problem.

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2. Missing Vocabulary (True Lexical Gaps)

A true lexical gap exists where Hmong has no existing word or idiom, even an imperfect one, for the source concept — as distinct from a crowded neighborhood, where Hmong has a word but it is already claimed by a competing referent.

2.1 Sovereign use of a wicked instrument (D2)

No Hmong theological or folk idiom expresses “a righteous power directing an unrighteous agent to accomplish righteous judgment, without endorsing the agent’s wickedness.” Hmong providence-language tends toward either impersonal fate (hmoov — already permanently forbidden for sovereignty contexts per the Romans TM) or direct personal causation (a spirit/ancestor acting, implying moral endorsement of the actor). Recommendation: resolve by paraphrase + teaching note, not by coining a new fixed term; anchor to the already-established Romans doctrine of delegated, God-ordained authority (cov muaj hwjchim kav teb chaws, Romans 13, High-risk) as the nearest structural analogy, explicitly noting that Nineveh’s own besieging army (unlike Rom 13’s authorities) is not said to be “instituted” in an ongoing legitimate sense — it is a one-time instrument of judgment, then itself judged. This distinction must be taught, not resolved lexically.

2.2 Emphatic double-verb legal certainty (D1/D4)

Biblical Hebrew’s infinitive-absolute-plus-finite-verb construction (naqeh lo yenaqeh, lit. “acquitting he will not acquit”) has no morphological parallel in Hmong, which lacks verbal reduplication-for-emphasis of this specific legal-certainty type. The existing rendering (Vajtswv yeej yuav tsis zam txim...) uses the adverb yeej (“certainly/indeed”) as a paraphrase-substitute for the Hebrew emphatic construction. Recommendation: this paraphrase is adequate and should remain fixed, but Phase 2 content must never drop yeej as “optional intensifier language” — it is the sole carrier of the construction’s emphatic force and must be treated as structurally mandatory, not stylistic.

2.3 Genre-marker “oracle/burden” (massa)

No single Hmong word combines “solemn spoken pronouncement” with “a heavy weight laid upon its recipient/target” the way Hebrew massa does (it puns on both senses). The existing rendering (zaj lus hnyav txiav txim, “a heavy word that judges”) is a necessary paraphrase, not a translation failure — no lexical gap-closing is possible here without inventing an artificial compound. Recommendation: accept the paraphrase as permanent; log the wordplay loss in a footnote rather than attempting a lexical fix.

2.4 Triple wordplay (buqah u-mevuqah u-mevullaqah, 2:10)

Hmong has no productive derivational pattern generating three rhyming intensified nouns from one root the way Hebrew does here. This is a poetic-device gap, not a doctrinal one. Recommendation: the existing three-phrase paraphrase (kev puas tsuaj, kev nyob do cuas, kev raug rhuav tshem tag nrho) is adequate; no further action needed beyond noting the poetic loss for translators aiming at a more literary register in future verse-form editions.

2.5 Reviewed, no new gap: minor nature/geography vocabulary

Bashan/Carmel/Lebanon (#37), sea/rivers (#35), mountains/rocks (#38, #41), locusts (#56), fig-tree imagery (#55) — all comprehension-level gaps already correctly logged in the core glossary as requiring footnotes, not new terms. No additional lexical gap beyond what is already documented.

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3. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing

A crowded neighborhood exists where a Hmong word/phrase is doctrinally correct for one referent but is also the natural word for a competing referent (traditional religion, or another sense within Nahum/Romans), such that context alone will not reliably disambiguate for the audience. Each entry below specifies the fence.

3.1 npau taws (anger) — three-way crowding

• Sense A (Nahum D1/D4): God’s righteous, judicial wrath against oppressors (#6, #15).
• Sense B (Hmong traditional religion): capricious ancestor/territorial-spirit anger, provoked by ritual neglect, appeasable by offering.
• Sense C (ordinary Hmong life): everyday human anger/irritation, morally neutral or negative.
• Fence: kev npau taws ntawm Vajtswv — the ntawm Vajtswv qualifier is structurally mandatory at every occurrence (identical enforcement pattern to the Romans TM), and paired teaching must state explicitly: (1) not appeasable by ritual/sacrifice, (2) not capricious, (3) not morally neutral human irritation — it is judicial and righteous.

3.2 pauj / pauj taub (repay, avenge) — crowding with clan-honor custom

• Sense A (Nahum D1): God’s exclusive, judicial vengeance against Nineveh.
• Sense B (Hmong clan custom): legitimate honor-based retaliation for injury/insult within clan-conflict resolution norms.
• Fence: the full qualifying clause raws li Vajtswv txoj kev ncaj ncees, tsis yog kev sib pauj ntawm tib neeg lossis ib tsev neeg must be treated as atomic and non-optional, exactly parallel to the Romans TM’s treatment of hwjchim/Txoj Kevcai. This fence is new to Nahum — Romans never needed it because Romans’ vengeance-adjacent vocabulary (wrath, judgment) did not collide with an honor-culture retaliation custom in the same direct way.

3.3 lub chaw ruaj khov (stronghold/refuge) — crowding with protective ritual objects

• Sense A (Nahum D3): God himself as the exclusive, sufficient refuge of the oppressed.
• Sense B (Hmong traditional religion): protective charms/amulets (khawv koob), guardian-spirit invocation, ritual protections against misfortune — precisely invoked “in a day of trouble.”
• Fence: full-sentence God-anchoring at every occurrence (tus Tswv yog peb lub chaw ruaj khov), never a bare noun phrase standing alone in a list or heading.

3.4 cawm root (cov uas cawm siab rau nws) — crowding with the Romans-fixed Christological salvation vocabulary

• Sense A (Nahum D3, pre-incarnation): trusting/taking refuge in YHWH.
• Sense B (Romans TM, fixed): kev cawm dim/cawm, mandatorily anchored to Yexus Khetos as sole agent.
• Fence: Nahum’s usage must remain lexically related (shared root, for canonical/typological coherence) but structurally distinct — anchored to tus Tswv (the LORD), never merged into the Romans TM entry’s Christological qualifier requirement, and never presented as though Nahum’s audience already possessed New-Testament-explicit faith in Christ. See §4.3 for the recommended resolution path.

3.5 dab mlom / dab word-family — crowding across idol, sorcery, and indwelling-sin/possession registers

• Sense A (Nahum D1): carved/cast idols (#19), correctly and deliberately reusing the Romans idol entry.
• Sense B (Nahum D1, ch.3): sorceries/witchcraft (#22, kev ua yaig) — NOT currently using the dab root directly, but sitting immediately adjacent to it in the same semantic field as the respected txiv neeb shamanic-healing role.
• Sense C (Romans TM, fixed): indwelling sin (kev txhaum nyob hauv) is explicitly forbidden from being paired with dab vocabulary (per Romans TM note on indwelling_sin).
• Fence: Nahum’s sorcery term (#22) must be kept lexically separate from both the idol term (#19, already fenced) and from any txiv neeb-adjacent healing vocabulary. This is the single most sensitive fencing decision in the entire package and is escalated at Ranked Ambiguity #1 below.

3.6 qhev (slave/servant) — crowding between literal and metaphorical registers across two Testaments

• Sense A (Nahum D1/D2, ch.3, literal): historical war-captives sold/deported into literal slavery (#26).
• Sense B (Romans TM, fixed, metaphorical): Paul’s honored, voluntary self-designation as Christ’s bondservant (doulos), explicitly requiring a catechetical note distinguishing it from involuntary chattel slavery.
• Fence: Nahum’s usage is the very thing Romans’ note warns against being confused with — i.e., Nahum #26 correctly retains the literal, involuntary, tragic sense, and curriculum content must never cross-apply Romans’ “honored bondservice” framing to Nahum 3’s captives, nor vice versa. This is a direction-of-fencing unique to a multi-book curriculum library and should be logged as a standing cross-book caution for any future OT curriculum reusing qhev.

3.7 ncaj ncees word-family — dormant crowding, not activated in Nahum but must not be broken

Nahum does not use a direct justification/righteousness-of-God construction requiring the Romans raug suav tias ncaj ncees pairing; however Nahum’s justice-vocabulary (kev ncaj ncees appears inside the vengeance qualifier at #5) sits close enough to the Romans-fixed forensic-imputation phrase that curriculum writers must not accidentally imply Nahum is making a justification-by-faith argument. Fence: any use of ncaj ncees in Nahum content must be understood as God’s retributive/distributive justice (giving each party what is due), not the Romans forensic-imputed righteousness doctrine — these are related but distinct biblical-theological categories and must be labeled as such in any cross-reference teaching note.

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4. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions

4.1 Proper nouns — transliteration is the default and correct choice

All proper nouns (Nahoos, Nineves, Axilias, Yakhauj, Yixalayees, Npasas, Kalemees, Lenpanoos, Nau-Amoos, Kushes, Puts, Linpias, tus Ekhauj) follow the established Hmong Bible transliteration convention. No paraphrase alternative was considered viable for any proper noun; the only open decision is footnoting density — first-occurrence footnotes are recommended for all toponyms unfamiliar to a Hmong audience (Bashan/Carmel/Lebanon, Thebes/Cush/Put/Libya), but this is a presentation decision, not a translation decision, and does not require TM-revision review.

4.2 Nahum’s name — transliteration plus mandatory meaning-gloss

Nahoos (transliteration) is correct and required, but unlike ordinary proper nouns, the name’s root meaning (“comfort/relent”) is doctrinally load-bearing for D3 before a single verse of judgment is spoken. Decision: transliterate the name but attach a permanent first-use footnote across every curriculum module (“Nahoos” = “kev nplig siab,” i.e., the same root Nahum’s own content later uses for “comforters,” #30) — this is not optional stylistic enrichment but a structural requirement, since the name itself is the book’s first move in the Comfort doctrine.

4.3 chosei/chasah (refuge/trust, #28) — the one item requiring a governance decision, not just a translation decision

This is flagged in the prior registry as [TRANSLATOR REVIEW NEEDED] for a reason that goes beyond ordinary term selection: it is a canonical-scope TM-governance question — should an Old Testament (pre-incarnation) refuge/trust term ever be permitted to typologically gesture toward the New Testament Christ-anchored salvation vocabulary fixed in the Romans TM? This analysis recommends the following resolution path for Phase 2 escalation:

1. Do not merge the two TM entries. cov uas cawm siab rau nws remains anchored to tus Tswv (YHWH) only, in Nahum’s own context.
2. Permit, but clearly separate, a curriculum-level (not lexical-level) typological teaching note stating that the New Testament identifies Yexus Khetos as tus Tswv (per the Romans-fixed practice of never substituting a divine name for kyrios), such that trusting/taking-refuge-in-YHWH in Nahum and trusting-in-Christ in Romans are ultimately trust in the same divine Person under progressive revelation — but this connection belongs in a teaching note/footnote, never inside the fixed lexical rendering itself.
3. Escalate formally to human theologian review before any Phase 2 content draws this connection explicitly, per the escalation rule inherited from 12_ai_translation_requirements.md §9 (“genuinely new theological term/concept… no clear analogue”).

4.4 keshaphim (sorceries, #22) — paraphrase is required; transliteration is rejected

A transliterated loanword was considered and rejected: it would be doctrinally opaque (failing to communicate real condemnation, per the Romans-baseline principle already applied to hilastērion and baptism) and would evade rather than resolve the txiv neeb collision. Paraphrase (kev ua yaig) is the correct category of decision, but the specific wording remains provisional pending joint theologian/native-speaker review (see Ranked Ambiguity #1).

4.5 massa (oracle/burden, #46) — paraphrase confirmed, transliteration rejected

A transliterated loanword here would be maximally opaque (no existing Hmong Christian usage to anchor it, unlike Abba in Romans, which had an established teaching purpose as an intimacy-marker). Paraphrase is confirmed as the permanent strategy; see §2.3.

4.6 YHWH Tzeva'ot (LORD of Hosts, #3) — descriptive-compound paraphrase confirmed, transliteration rejected

Transliterating “Tzeva’ot” was considered and rejected because it would create an unglossed loanword with zero existing Hmong Christian usage and would fail to trigger the necessary contrast-teaching against shamanic spirit-army invocation. The descriptive compound (tus Tswv uas Kav Cov Tub Rog Saum Ntuj Ceeb Tsheej) is confirmed as the permanent baseline rendering, carrying the same High-risk profile documented in the registry.

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5. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities

Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × collision specificity × likelihood of default mistranslation), highest risk first. This ranking governs Phase 2 escalation priority and should feed directly into a future doctrine_risk_registry.json for Nahum.

Rank	Item	Doctrine(s)	Risk Tier	Why It Ranks Here
1	Sorceries/witchcraft (#22, keshaphim)	D1	Critical	The only term in the entire package where the correct condemnation target (nation-enslaving occult manipulation) sits directly adjacent, in the shared Hmong lexicon, to a respected, currently-practiced social role (txiv neeb). Every other Critical item in this package risks distorting a doctrine; this one risks giving doctrinal offense to, or being misheard as blanket condemnation of, a living community practice. Requires joint human theologian + native-speaker review before any wording is finalized.
2	chosei/chasah refuge-trust vs. Romans’ fixed Christological kev cawm dim (#28)	D3	High (governance-tier)	Not a simple mistranslation risk but a cross-book TM-governance gap: get this wrong and either (a) Nahum’s refuge-promise is anachronistically over-Christianized, flattening progressive revelation, or (b) the canonical unity of Scripture’s refuge-theme across Testaments is severed with no teaching bridge at all. Requires formal theologian-level policy decision, not just a lexical choice.
3	”Slow to anger” / “will not clear the guilty” pairing (#7 + #8)	D4, D1	Critical	The book’s — and this doctrine’s — central paradox. If the pair is ever separated in any generated content (a real risk in space-constrained contexts like quiz stems or headers), the result is either an angry-capricious-spirit reading or a permissive-appeasable-spirit reading, both of which directly re-import the very animistic categories Nahum’s God is being distinguished from. Structural pairing rule must be enforced with the same rigor as Romans’ hwjchim→Vajtswv hwjchim atomic-unit rule.
4	pauj/vengeance qualifier (#5)	D1	High	Unlike Romans (which had no clan-retaliation-custom collision of this specific kind), Nahum directly risks validating honor-based clan vengeance if the exclusivity qualifier is dropped — a genuinely new collision category not previously encountered in the Romans baseline, meaning there is no precedent enforcement pattern to fall back on beyond the general structural-pairing method.
5	lub chaw ruaj khov / stronghold (#27) and its refuge-word-family (#28, #29)	D3	High	Directly collides with protective-charm and guardian-spirit practices invoked in exactly the same rhetorical slot (“day of trouble” protection). Comfort-for-the-Oppressed is this curriculum’s pastorally central doctrine; a failure here does not just blur a concept, it risks pointing suffering hearers toward syncretistic practice at the exact moment the text intends to redirect them exclusively to God.
6	YHWH Tzeva'ot / LORD of Hosts (#3)	D2	High	Every occurrence risks being heard as “a bigger spirit-general” rather than the unique sovereign Creator-Commander; unlike #5 above, the collision is with an invoked-power practice rather than a protective-object practice, requiring a distinct contrast-teaching angle (command-authority vs. protective-refuge).
7	kalah/full end (#16) and ein kehah/no healing (#23) — the finality pair	D1, D3	Critical	These two Critical items are lexically separate but doctrinally one claim (total, unremedied judgment on the unrepentant oppressor) bracketing the whole book; softening either into “hardship” or “difficulty” collapses the very totality that grounds the oppressed’s comfort in doctrine D3. Must be taught as a matched pair across chapters 1 and 3, not as two unrelated Critical terms.
< /table row continued below >
8	qanno'/jealous (#4)	D1, D4	High	Risk of being heard as capricious territorial-spirit possessiveness rather than God’s unique, morally consistent claim to exclusive worship; mitigated but not eliminated by the mandatory parenthetical qualifier, since the qualifier is long and may be truncated under editorial space pressure in headers/quiz stems.
9	hineni elayikh / “I am against you” (#13)	D1, D2	Critical	Risk of flattening a first-person personal-opposition divine formula into a mere impersonal prediction (“bad things will happen”), which would sever the Sovereignty doctrine (God personally, actively opposing Nineveh) from the Justice doctrine (this opposition is judicially warranted, not arbitrary).
10	qhev cross-book direction-of-use (#26 vs. Romans doulos)	D1, D2	Medium-High (library-level)	Lower per-instance risk than items 1-9 within Nahum alone, but ranked here because it is the clearest example in this whole package of a term whose correct sense in one curriculum book is precisely the sense flagged as a risk to avoid in another — a standing hazard for any curriculum team working across both Language Packages simultaneously.

Not ranked (monitored, not currently high-risk): grafting-style comprehension gaps (lion/tiger bridge #44, fig-tree #55, locust #56, toponym footnotes #37/#53) are logged as Medium/Low and are comprehension-only; they do not currently warrant Critical/High escalation and are not repeated here, consistent with the full-book-coverage mandate’s requirement to note reviewed-but-thin material explicitly rather than omit it.

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6. Chapter-by-Chapter Coverage Confirmation

• Chapter 1 (core passage 1:1-8 plus 1:9-15): Full gap analysis performed above; highest-density chapter (Ranked items #1-9 all touch ch.1 material except #1, #10, #26 which are ch.3-only, and #3/#43 which are ch.2). Reviewed, substantial new gaps documented.
• Chapter 2: Reviewed. Contributes YHWH Tzeva’ot (#3, ranked #6), the Shatterer/sovereign-instrument gap (§2.1), and comprehension-level lion/tiger and toponym items. No additional Critical items beyond what chapter 1 and chapter 3 already carry.
• Chapter 3: Reviewed. Contributes the single highest-priority item in this entire analysis (#22 sorceries, ranked #1), the finality-pair’s second half (#23, ranked #7), the qhev cross-book caution (#26, ranked #10), and several Medium/Low comprehension-level items (harlot metaphor, locust, fig-tree, shepherd-slumber) with no further doctrinal escalation needed beyond what is already logged in 08_core_glossary.md and the registry.

No chapter of Nahum is silently omitted from this analysis.

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7. Summary Recommendations Carried Forward to Phase 2

1. Enforce structural atomic-pairing rules for #7+#8 (slow to anger / will not clear the guilty) and for #16+#23 (full end / no healing) with the same rigor as the Romans TM’s hwjchim→Vajtswv hwjchim and ncaj ncees→raug suav tias ncaj ncees rules.
2. Escalate #22 (sorceries) to joint human theologian + native-speaker review before assigning any permanent rendering; do not publish provisional wording as final.
3. Resolve the chosei/chasah (#28) cross-Testament governance question via a formal theologian-reviewed teaching-note policy, not a lexical merger with the Romans-fixed salvation_save entry.
4. Adopt the new pauj/vengeance qualifier-clause as a mandatory atomic unit, logged as a Nahum-specific addition to the forbidden-substitution table in any future Nahum equivalent of 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
5. Add a standing cross-book caution to the shared Hmong-curriculum TM governance process regarding qhev’s opposite-direction risk profile in Nahum (literal, tragic) versus Romans (honored, voluntary).
6. Carry forward all proper-noun transliterations unchanged; require first-use footnotes for unfamiliar toponyms and for Nahoos’s meaning-bearing name.

This document constitutes the complete Phase 1 Step 8 deliverable for the Nahum Hmong Language Package and is intended to feed directly into the doctrine risk registry and AI translation requirements documents at the next pipeline stage.