Psalms — Executive Summary (Hmong Language Package, Psalms Extension)

Why it matters: The Hmong Psalms Language Package extends a proven, doctrinally-supervised Romans baseline into the Bible’s largest, most liturgically central book — anchored on Psalm 23, the single most widely-known passage in the curriculum’s destination culture. Getting it right unlocks the Psalter’s Shepherd, King, Refuge, and Hesed vocabulary for Hmong discipleship; getting it wrong risks quietly re-importing the fate-based (koob hmoov), spirit-mediated (pehawm dab, txiv neeb), and ancestor-interactive (Sheol-collision) worldview this whole pipeline exists to translate against, not through.

By the numbers:

• 98 total TM terms governed for this book: 39 inherited unchanged from the Romans baseline, 59 new Psalms-specific candidates requiring theologian sign-off.
• 18 Critical-risk terms and 21 High-risk terms (plus 2 Medium-High boundary terms) — 39-41 terms, or roughly 40% of the entire glossary, demand zero-tolerance fixed rendering.
• All 8 assigned doctrines (Character of God as Shepherd/King/Refuge, Lament and Honest Prayer, Praise and Worship, Messianic Prophecy, Confession and Forgiveness, Righteous and Wicked, Covenant Faithfulness/Hesed, Kingship/Messianic King) are rated Critical (6) or High (2) risk — none are Medium or Low — meaning 100% of doctrinal content requires mandatory human theologian review before publication, with no automated-review bypass permitted.
• All 150 chapters reviewed and logged; none silently skipped.

Key findings

• Hesed is the single highest-stakes new term in the package. It anchors the core passage (Ps 23:6) and recurs in Ps 85, 89, 103, 107, 130, and 26 times in Ps 136 alone. It requires the same TM-revision-review-level protection the Romans baseline gives charis, election, and righteousness — and the identical forbidden substitution (koob hmoov).
• Psalm 51:11-12 is the highest-density doctrinal risk point in the entire curriculum. Two adjacent verses require opposite Vaj-prefix treatment (Holy Spirit vs. human spirit); a single dropped or misapplied prefix inverts the Confession and Forgiveness doctrine at its center.
• Esher (“blessed,” Ps 1:1) reproduces the grace/koob hmoov collision at the Psalter’s own opening word, and recurs as its most-repeated structural refrain (~18 chapters) — making The Righteous and the Wicked doctrine as fragile to a single lexical slip as Justification by Faith is in Romans.
• Sheol introduces an entirely new class of collision not present in the Romans baseline: a competing cosmological framework (ongoing interactive ancestor presence) rather than a ritual-practice or fate-vocabulary collision, surfacing in the Messianic Prophecy doctrine (Ps 16:10) and general anthropology.
• The Shepherd-King-Refuge doctrine is structurally, not just lexically, fragile: the Hebrew word shebet deliberately binds Psalm 23:4’s pastoral rod to Psalm 2:9/110:2’s royal scepter, requiring a manually-maintained cross-reference discipline rather than a single fixed word.
• Psalm 82:6 (“ye are gods”) has no prior TM precedent anywhere in the pipeline and required an entirely new descriptive construction to avoid appearing to endorse polytheism in a spirit-populated cosmology.

Risks

• Highest severity (Critical, doctrine-inverting if mishandled): hesed/koob hmoov, Ps 51:11-12 prefix discipline, esher/koob hmoov, Sheol/ancestor-realm conflation, Ps 51:10’s “clean heart” ritual-purity misreading, Ps 82:6 polytheism misreading, Ps 2:7/45:6/89 Messianic deity-and-Sonship softening, Ps 110:4 Melchizedek/shaman conflation.
• High severity (collision-specific, manageable with documented fencing): refuge/rock imagery vs. protective-charm (khawv koob) practice; imprecatory psalms vs. curse/counter-curse ritual; Ps 110:1’s lexically-invisible two-Person distinction; pehawm vs. pehawm dab (inherited, recurring at very high density across ~15 praise psalms).
• Cross-cutting risk: roughly 40% of all glossary terms are Critical/High, and 100% of doctrines require theologian escalation — this is a higher mandatory-review density than the Romans baseline, driven by the Psalter’s genre breadth (hymn, lament, wisdom, royal, penitential) each surfacing its own collision class.

Opportunities

• Strong positive cultural bridges exist and should be actively leveraged, not merely defused: Hmong hospitality-feasting customs illuminate Ps 23:5’s table imagery; clan-inheritance and clan-adoption customs illuminate Kingship/heir vocabulary; agrarian rice-harvest and threshing imagery illuminate Ps 1’s chaff metaphor and firstfruits language; Hmong musical culture (qeej, drums, gongs) offers a ready bridge for the closing Hallelujah Psalms’ instrument cluster.
• Psalm 115/135’s idol polemic reinforces, rather than merely repeats, the Romans baseline’s pehawm Vajtswv/pehawm dab contrast — an opportunity to deepen (not just maintain) prior doctrinal teaching.
• The Confession and Forgiveness doctrine’s Ps 51 material offers the richest single teaching unit in the curriculum for correcting the Hmong ritual-restitution model of wrongdoing, precisely because it names sin three distinct ways and pairs confession with the Holy-Spirit-anticipating prayer of v.11.

Recommended actions

1. Route all 8 doctrines and all 39-41 Critical/High terms to mandatory human theologian review before any Phase 2 content is published — no automated-review bypass, per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json.
2. Escalate Psalm 51:10-12 as a standing, permanent review flag (not a one-time check) for every future lesson, footnote, or quiz item touching this passage, given its zero-tolerance prefix discipline.
3. Formally test the constructed hesed and esher compound phrases with native Hmong speakers before promoting them from candidate to permanent TM status, since both are newly-coined periphrases with no prior Hmong Christian idiom to draw on.
4. Adopt “Nkauj Qhuas” as the working Psalms citation label pending formal confirmation, and carry forward the HWB/YouVersion 1663 recommendation with the PSA book code, consistent with the Romans baseline’s citation infrastructure.
5. Build the shebet (rod/scepter) and Sheol contrast-teaching notes as reusable curriculum assets early, since both recur across many anchor chapters (Ps 2, 23, 45, 89, 110 for shebet; Ps 6, 16, 18, 30, 31, 49, 55, 86, 88, 89, 116, 139, 141 for Sheol) and would otherwise require redundant re-authoring.
6. Do not treat any of the 59 new Psalms-specific TM terms as final until theologian sign-off closes the candidate-review loop opened in this Phase 1 package.