Linguistic Gap Analysis
06 — Linguistic Gap Analysis: Leviticus (English → Mandarin)
Curriculum: Leviticus 1–27
Core passage: Leviticus 16:1–34
Destination language: Mandarin Chinese (Simplified script, CUV/Shen-edition register)
Depends on: baseline translation_memory.json, baseline bible_term_registry.json, baseline doctrine_risk_registry.json (Romans); 08_core_glossary.md and assets/bible_term_registry.json (Leviticus, prior output)
Status: All renderings below are consistent with and extend the prior outputs. No baseline or prior-glossary rendering is altered here.
0. Purpose and Method
This analysis performs the PRD Phase 1 Step 8 task: identify where Mandarin lacks adequate vocabulary for a Levitical concept (“missing vocabulary”), where Mandarin has too much competing vocabulary that risks importing the wrong worldview (“crowded semantic neighborhoods needing fencing”), where a proper noun or technical term should be transliterated versus paraphrased, and which resulting ambiguities carry the highest doctrinal risk for this specific curriculum.
Coverage spans all 27 chapters of Leviticus. Chapters that introduce no new load-bearing vocabulary beyond what is already fixed in the glossary are explicitly marked “reviewed, no new terms” in §5, per the full-book coverage mandate — they are not silently skipped.
1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
| Doctrine | Available Mandarin Term(s) | Weaknesses / Gaps | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Sacrificial System and Atonement | 赎罪 (atone), 赎罪祭 (sin offering), 赎愆祭 (guilt offering), 燔祭 (burnt offering), 素祭 (grain offering), 平安祭 (peace offering), 祭物/供物 (offering, general), 血 (blood), 祭坛 (altar) | No single Mandarin verb captures kipper’s fused sense of “cover / appease / cleanse / ransom.” 祭物/供物 sit one register away from the crowded folk-offering neighborhood (祭祖, 上供, 烧纸). 血 risks folk blood-oath/potency readings if unglossed. | Retain the CUV compound family (赎罪*, 燔/素/平安*祭) exactly; never render kipper with a single generic verb like 补偿 or 遮盖. Require a standing teaching note on 血 as life-bearing atoning medium (cf. Lev 17:11) at first occurrence in every lesson unit, not just once globally. |
| The Holiness of God and the Call to Be Holy | 圣洁 (holy, baseline reused), 至圣所 (Most Holy Place), 分别为圣 (consecrate), 圣安息日 (solemn-rest Sabbath), 亵渎 (profane/blaspheme), 凡火 (strange fire), 可憎恶的事 (abomination) | 圣 root is shared with the Confucian 圣人 (sage) register and the Daoist/Buddhist 清净 (ritual/meditative purity) register — both attainment-through-effort concepts baseline already flags for 圣洁/成圣. Leviticus intensifies this risk by repeating “Be holy, for I am holy” (11:44–45; 19:2; 20:26) far more densely than Romans does. | Every occurrence of the “Be holy” refrain must carry a note that holiness here is a command grounded in God’s own being and enacted through obedience in ordinary communal life, not ascetic withdrawal (道士/隐修 register) or sage-like moral perfection (圣人 register). |
| The Priesthood and Mediation | 祭司 (priest), 大祭司 (high priest), 受膏的 (anointed), 承接圣职 (ordination) | Mandarin’s available ritual-specialist vocabulary (和尚, 道士, 巫师) is uniformly rejected but culturally available and closer to hand than 祭司 for many readers’ intuitive mental model of “a man who performs rites for a fee/for merit.” | Reinforce 祭司 with explicit negative contrast teaching notes at every major occurrence in chs. 1–10 and 21–22, not only at the term’s first introduction — the risk of readers unconsciously substituting a Daoist/Buddhist ritual-specialist mental model recurs throughout, not just once. |
| Clean and Unclean | 洁净 (clean), 不洁净/污秽 (unclean), 可憎的 (detestable, dietary), 大麻风 (skin disease) | 洁净 vs 清净 is a one-character visual/orthographic collision (洁 vs 清) with the Daoist/Buddhist practice-attained purity register — a transcription or autocomplete error is plausible, not merely a conceptual one. 不洁净 risks being flattened into 罪 (sin) despite covering many morally neutral bodily states. | Standing validation rule (see §4 below): automated proofreading must flag any occurrence of 清净 in a doctrinal context as a probable transcription error for 洁净. Teaching notes must state explicitly, at first occurrence per unit, that uncleanness ≠ sin. |
| The Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) | 赎罪日 (Day of Atonement), 圣安息日 (solemn rest), 刻苦己心 (afflict the soul/fast), 抽签 (lot casting) | English “Day of Atonement” reads as a single discrete religious holiday to a secular audience; Mandarin 赎罪日 could be absorbed into the generic 传统节日 (traditional-holiday) semantic slot unless explicitly distinguished. 刻苦己心 risks conflation with 苦行 (Buddhist ascetic merit-practice). | Teach 赎罪日 always paired with 节期 (appointed feast) vocabulary and explicitly distinguished from 传统节日; retain 刻苦己心 exactly and gloss against 苦行 at every occurrence, since this doctrine’s key passage (ch. 16) uses the phrase three times (16:29, 31; cf. 23:27). |
| The Scapegoat and Substitution | 替罪羊 (scapegoat, doctrine name), 归给阿撒泻勒的羊 (in-text technical referent), 阿撒泻勒 (Azazel), 按手 (lay hands), 认罪 (confess), 担/背负 (bear/carry, nasa) | 替罪羊 is a live, high-frequency secular idiom in modern Mandarin with the opposite moral valence (an innocent party unjustly blamed) from the doctrine it must name (a divinely appointed, willingly-enacted symbol of substitutionary guilt-removal). This is a fenced-neighborhood problem, not a missing-vocabulary problem — see §3. | Never use 替罪羊 in running doctrinal exposition without an adjacent clarifying clause in the same sentence or footnote; use 归给阿撒泻勒的羊 for the specific in-text ritual referent in Lev 16:8–10, 20–22, reserving 替罪羊 for the doctrine’s name only, always flagged. |
| Sabbath and Sacred Time | 安息日 (weekly Sabbath), 安息年 (Sabbath year), 禧年 (Jubilee), 节期 (appointed feasts), 永远的定例 (perpetual statute), 救赎/赎 (redeem) | 禧年 is visually/phonetically adjacent to 新年 (Chinese New Year) — a false-friend collision risk, not a doctrinal-worldview collision, but still liable to cause reader confusion given the high cultural salience of 新年. 救赎 risks collapsing into the commercial pawnshop sense of 赎当 if unglossed. | Gloss 禧年 with its numeric referent (“第五十年,” “the fiftieth year”) at first occurrence per unit to block the 新年 false-friend reading. Gloss 救赎 against 赎当 wherever the kinsman-redeemer background (ch. 25) is in view. |
| Love of Neighbor (Leviticus 19:18) | 邻舍 (neighbor), 寄居的 (sojourner) | 邻舍 vs the far more common modern 邻居 is a register gap: 邻居 is what a modern reader will reach for unprompted, but it narrows the command to physical proximity and loses both the covenant-community scope Leviticus intends and the universalizing trajectory Christ later gives it. No existing single Mandarin term captures ger’s specific “resident alien with covenant legal protections” status — this is a genuine missing-vocabulary gap, not merely a crowded neighborhood. | Retain 邻舍 exactly, never substitute 邻居 in doctrinal exposition. For ger, retain 寄居的 as a compound and always supply the Egypt-memory rationale (19:34) in the same teaching unit, since no shorter Mandarin term carries that rationale implicitly. |
2. Missing Vocabulary — Genuine Lexical Gaps
These are concepts for which Mandarin has no single existing word or established Christian compound that captures the full Hebrew semantic range; periphrasis, compounding, or an explanatory apparatus is required rather than a one-to-one substitution.
| Concept | Hebrew | Gap description | Chosen strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kipper (atone) | כִּפֵּר | Fuses “cover,” “appease,” “cleanse,” and “ransom” in a single verb; no Mandarin verb carries all four senses simultaneously. | Retain established CUV compound 赎罪 (lit. “redeem-sin”) as the fixed technical rendering; supply the fuller semantic range in teaching notes rather than attempting a more “complete” one-word alternative. |
| Qorban (offering, general) | קָרְבָּן | Names not the object given but the act of drawing near via a prescribed gift; Mandarin 祭物/供物 name only the object. | Use 祭物 as the fixed noun but supplement with periphrasis (“蒙神指定、使人得以亲近神的礼物”) at first doctrinal occurrence per unit. |
| Asham (guilt/trespass offering) | אָשָׁם | Fuses cultic atonement with a quantifiable material-restitution obligation (Lev 5:16, 6:5) — Mandarin has no single compound that names “atonement-plus-repayment” as one unit. | Retain 赎愆祭 and explicitly teach the repayment component (加五分之一, “plus one-fifth”) as an inseparable part of the term’s meaning, not an optional footnote. |
| Nephesh (life-in-the-blood) | נֶפֶשׁ | Not a Platonic/dualistic “soul” (灵魂) nor merely biological “life” (生命 alone under-translates its personal, willing, appetitive dimensions). | Use 生命 as the fixed rendering per the prior registry decision, but require a standing note blocking the 灵魂 reading, since 灵魂 is the term most readers will reach for unprompted when they hear “the life is in the blood.” |
| Tamim (without blemish/whole) | תָּמִים | Applies identically to sacrificial animals (ch. 1) and to priests’ own bodies (ch. 21) — Mandarin 无残疾的 captures the physical-defect sense but not the underlying unity-of-standard between animal and priest that typologically anticipates Christ. | Retain 无残疾的 as the fixed rendering; add cross-reference notes linking ch. 1 and ch. 21 occurrences explicitly, since Mandarin vocabulary alone will not surface this link for the reader. |
| Ger (resident alien) | גֵּר | No modern Mandarin legal or social category matches “a non-citizen permanently dwelling among the covenant people with protected legal status grounded in the host nation’s own history of displacement.” | Retain compound 寄居的 (distinct from baseline 外邦人) and require the Egypt-memory rationale (19:34) as mandatory co-text, not an optional gloss. |
| Chuqqat olam (perpetual statute) | חֻקַּת עוֹלָם | Mandarin 永远的定例 is adequate lexically but sits in a gap between “law” (律法, baseline) and “custom” (习俗) — readers may not intuitively grasp why this is neither. | Retain 永远的定例; note in teaching material that this is a subset of 律法 applied to specific recurring cultic practices, not a separate legal category. |
3. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing
Unlike §2, these are cases where Mandarin has abundant, readily available vocabulary — but the available words carry strong competing associations from Chinese folk religion, Buddhism, Daoism, or Confucian ethics that must be actively fenced off rather than assumed safe.
3.1 The 圣 (holy) cluster
圣洁, 圣徒 (baseline), 至圣所, 圣安息日, 分别为圣, 成圣 (baseline) all share the root 圣, which is also the root of 圣人 (Confucian sage, an elite attainment category) and appears in Daoist/Buddhist sacred-site vocabulary (圣地, 圣地朝圣). Leviticus’s dense “Be holy, for I am holy” repetition (11:44–45; 19:2; 20:7, 26) makes this the single most frequently recurring fencing requirement in the entire book. Fencing rule: every occurrence of the holiness refrain must state that holiness is conferred by relationship to God and enacted through obedience, never achieved through self-cultivation into sage-status or attained through ritual/meditative technique.
3.2 The 祭 (sacrifice/offering) cluster
燔祭, 素祭, 平安祭, 赎罪祭, 赎愆祭, 祭司, 祭坛, 祭物 all share 祭, which is also the root of 祭祖 (ancestor veneration), 祭拜 (worshiping at a shrine), and 上供 (presenting offerings to a folk deity) — the most common religious-ritual vocabulary a secular or folk-religious Mandarin reader already owns. Fencing rule: every sacrificial term must be taught in explicit contrast to the reciprocal-favor logic of ancestor/folk offerings — Leviticus’s sacrifices are God’s own prescribed means of approach, not a negotiated exchange for protection or luck.
3.3 洁净 vs 清净 (clean vs Daoist/Buddhist purity)
A one-character visual collision (洁 vs 清) rather than a semantic-field collision — but the semantic proximity (“ritual purity/cleanness”) makes the visual similarity especially dangerous, since a plausible-looking wrong character could pass unnoticed in review. Fencing rule: treat as a validation-layer issue (see §4), not only a teaching-note issue.
3.4 恩 (grace) cluster
恩典 (baseline), 施恩座 (mercy seat) share 恩 with 功德 (merit) and 阴德 (hidden merit) only insofar as all four sit in the same general “favorable outcome” semantic space — but 恩典/施恩座 are on the unmerited side while 功德/阴德 are on the earned/ledger side. Leviticus’s mercy seat (施恩座) is the doctrinally rich anchor point for this fencing, since it names the literal location where atoning grace is dispensed. Fencing rule: teach 施恩座 as “the place where unearned favor is granted,” always paired with the baseline’s existing 功德/阴德 rejection.
3.5 命 (calling/lot/fate) cluster
抽签 (lot-casting, Lev 16:8) sits near 求签 (temple fortune-stick drawing) and, via the baseline’s existing fencing, near 天命, 命运, 缘分 (already rejected for 呼召/拣选 in the Romans package). Leviticus’s lot-casting is a one-time, God-directed ritual assignment mechanism between two specific goats — not a technique for reading personal fate or fortune. Fencing rule: extend the baseline’s existing 天命/命运/缘分 fence to explicitly cover 抽签/求签 for this curriculum.
3.6 神/主/耶和华/天 cluster
Leviticus’s refrain “I am the LORD your God” compounds three already-fenced baseline terms (神, 主) with a new one (耶和华) and the rejected generic 天 (impersonal Heaven). This is the single highest-density theological-proper-noun cluster in the book. Fencing rule: see dedicated ranked-risk entry in §6 below; this cluster is promoted to the top of the ambiguity ranking precisely because of its repetition frequency (the formula recurs roughly 50 times across chs. 18–26 alone).
3.7 许愿 (vow) vs temple-vow bargaining
许愿 is the ordinary Mandarin word both for a Levitical vow and for the transactional, conditional promise-for-favor bargain a worshiper strikes with a folk deity or Buddhist bodhisattva at a temple (as in 还愿, “repaying” a vow once the requested favor is granted). Leviticus’s vow (ch. 27) is unconditional and addressed to the one true covenant God. Fencing rule: never present a Levitical vow narrative without explicitly denying the bargaining structure implicit in temple 许愿/还愿 practice.
3.8 替罪羊 secular idiom
Already treated above (§1, Scapegoat doctrine row) and ranked in §6; included here for completeness as the clearest case of a “crowded neighborhood” where the available native idiom actively inverts the doctrine’s meaning rather than merely under-specifying it.
4. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Category | Decision | Examples | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proper names of God / divine designations | Transliterate the covenant Name; reuse baseline title | 耶和华 (YHWH, transliteration); 神 (Elohim, baseline paraphrase-as-established-term); 主 (Adonai, baseline title) | The Name must be visually and lexically distinct from the generic-noun/title layer so that Leviticus’s “I am the LORD” formula retains its personal, redemptive-historical grounding rather than collapsing into an abstract moral order. |
| Uncertain/contested proper nouns | Transliterate, with mandatory explanatory note | 阿撒泻勒 (Azazel); 摩洛 (Molech) | Where the referent is genuinely disputed among scholars (Azazel) or is a rival deity whose nature is already clear from context (Molech), transliteration avoids smuggling in an interpretive paraphrase (e.g., rendering Azazel as “demon” or “goat-spirit,” which would overcommit to one contested reading). |
| Technical cultic/ritual nouns with an established CUV compound | Reuse the CUV paraphrase-compound exactly | 赎罪, 燔祭, 素祭, 平安祭, 赎罪祭, 赎愆祭, 至圣所, 施恩座 | These compounds are already load-bearing in the wider Chinese Christian tradition; introducing a new coinage would fracture consistency with existing CUV-based teaching materials and Bible editions in circulation. |
| Novel or rare Hebrew ritual-action terms without a settled CUV rendering | Paraphrase functionally, fenced with a note | 刻苦己心 (afflict the soul); 按手 (lay hands, distinguished from NT usage); 分别为圣 (consecrate) | No transliteration is possible (these are not proper nouns), and a single-character or two-character gloss would be too thin to carry the ritual’s function; a short functional phrase, taught consistently, is more stable than a shifting one-word attempt. |
| Doctrine-naming labels not found verbatim in the text | Use the closest existing Mandarin idiom, but only with mandatory clarifying apparatus | 替罜羊 → 替罪羊 (scapegoat, as doctrine name only) | Coining an entirely new phrase to avoid the secular idiom’s baggage (e.g., an invented four-character phrase) would isolate the curriculum’s vocabulary from all wider Mandarin Christian and secular discourse about “scapegoating,” making cross-cultural teaching harder, not easier. The existing idiom is retained but permanently fenced. |
| Measurement / calendrical technical terms | Paraphrase using existing Chinese-Christian calendrical vocabulary, glossed against false friends | 禧年 (Jubilee, glossed against 新年); 安息年 (Sabbath year); 节期 (appointed feasts, glossed against 传统节日) | These already have serviceable Christian-tradition renderings; the risk is reader confusion with parallel secular Chinese calendrical vocabulary, not a doctrinal-worldview collision, so paraphrase-plus-gloss is sufficient without transliteration. |
General decision rule applied throughout: transliterate only (a) the covenant Name and (b) genuinely uncertain or contested proper nouns where any paraphrase would prematurely resolve scholarly disagreement. Paraphrase everything else, preferring an existing CUV or wider-tradition compound over a novel coinage, and add a fencing note wherever the paraphrase shares vocabulary with a competing folk-religious, Buddhist, Daoist, or Confucian semantic neighborhood.
5. Chapter-by-Chapter Coverage Ledger (Leviticus 1–27)
Per the full-book coverage mandate, every chapter is accounted for below. Chapters contributing no new load-bearing vocabulary beyond terms already fixed in 08_core_glossary.md / assets/bible_term_registry.json are marked “reviewed, no new terms.”
| Ch. | Load-bearing content | New/reinforced terms |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Burnt offering instructions | 燔祭, 无残疾的, 祭坛, 按手 (implicit) |
| 2 | Grain offering instructions | 素祭; covenant-salt phrase reuses baseline 约 |
| 3 | Peace offering; fat/blood prohibition | 平安祭; seeds 血/生命 doctrine (fully developed at ch.17) |
| 4 | Sin offering for unintentional sin | 赎罪祭, 祭司, 受膏的 |
| 5 | Sin/guilt offering graduated scale | 赎罪祭 continued; guilt dimension begins (→ ch.6) |
| 6 | Guilt offering; perpetual fire on altar | 赎愆祭, 永远的定例 |
| 7 | Peace offering portions; blood-eating prohibition | Reinforces 血, 祭司’s portion |
| 8 | Ordination of Aaron and sons | 承接圣职, 膏油, 按手, 无残疾的 (priestly application) |
| 9 | First sacrifices; the glory of the LORD appears | Reuses baseline 荣耀 (glory); reviewed, no new Leviticus-specific terms |
| 10 | Nadab and Abihu’s strange fire | 凡火 — high-risk term, Holiness doctrine core illustration |
| 11 | Clean/unclean animals; dietary law | 洁净, 不洁净, 可憎的 |
| 12 | Purification after childbirth | Reinforces 不洁净; reviewed, no new terms beyond ch.11/15 |
| 13 | Diagnosis of skin disease | 大麻风; reinforces 祭司’s declarative (non-therapeutic) role |
| 14 | Cleansing rites for skin disease/houses | Reinforces 洁净/不洁净; ritual-object nouns (cedar wood, scarlet thread, hyssop) noted Low risk, not tabulated as standalone doctrine terms |
| 15 | Bodily discharges and uncleanness | Reinforces 不洁净; reviewed, no new terms |
| 16 | CORE PASSAGE — Day of Atonement | 赎罪日, 大祭司, 施恩座, 阿撒泻勒, 替罪羊/归给阿撒泻勒的羊, 按手, 认罪, 担/背负, 旷野, 刻苦己心, 圣安息日, 永远的定例, 罪孽, 过犯, 罪 (three-term cluster at 16:21) |
| 17 | Blood is life; prohibition on eating blood | 生命 (nephesh), reinforces 血; altar-exclusivity reinforces 祭坛 |
| 18 | Sexual holiness laws | 露…的下体 (ervah), 可憎恶的事 (to’evah, first major occurrence) |
| 19 | Holiness code; love of neighbor; sojourner; mediums | 邻舍, 寄居的, 交鬼的/行巫术的; reinforces 圣洁 refrain |
| 20 | Penalties for abominations; Molech; cut off | 剪除, 摩洛; reinforces 可憎恶的事 |
| 21 | Priestly holiness standards | Reinforces 无残疾的 (applied to priests), 祭司 restrictions |
| 22 | Sacrificial animal standards; eating holy things | Reinforces 无残疾的, 祭物; begins 亵渎 theme |
| 23 | Appointed feasts calendar, incl. Day of Atonement’s calendar placement | 节期, 安息日 reinforced, 圣安息日 reinforced |
| 24 | Showbread; blasphemy; lex talionis | 陈设饼 (Low risk), 亵渎, 以眼还眼以牙还牙 (Low risk, naturalized idiom) |
| 25 | Sabbath year, Jubilee, redemption | 安息年, 禧年, 救赎/赎 |
| 26 | Covenant blessings and curses | 咒诅; reinforces baseline 约 |
| 27 | Vows; dedication; redemption valuations | 许愿, 分别为圣; reinforces 救赎 |
6. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities for This Curriculum
Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × collision plausibility × recurrence frequency in-text):
-
替罪羊 (scapegoat idiom inversion) — Critical. The single available native Mandarin idiom for “scapegoat” carries the opposite moral valence (unjust blame of an innocent party) from Leviticus 16’s divinely appointed, willingly enacted ritual. Central to the Scapegoat and Substitution doctrine and the core passage. Every occurrence requires clarifying apparatus; automated review alone is insufficient.
-
神 / 主 / 耶和华 / 天 layered proper-noun-and-title cluster — Critical. Leviticus’s “I am the LORD your God” formula recurs roughly 50 times (concentrated in chs. 18–26), the highest repetition density of any theological formula in the curriculum. Any silent collapse of 耶和华 into 主 (losing the Name/title distinction) or into 天 (an impersonal-Heaven reading already rejected in baseline) would erase the book’s central rhetorical move: grounding ethics in God’s own covenant-name identity rather than an abstract moral order.
-
洁净 vs 清净 (one-character transcription collision) — High, but distinct in kind from the other entries: this is as much a proofreading/validation risk as a conceptual one, since the two terms are near-homographs (洁 vs 清) naming semantically adjacent but doctrinally opposed concepts (God-declared covenant status vs. self-attained meditative/ritual purity). Recommend a dedicated automated string-check in Phase 2 validation, not reliance on human proofreading alone.
-
恩 cluster: 施恩座 vs 功德/阴德 — Critical (inherited from baseline grace fencing, intensified). The mercy seat’s very name bears 恩, making the Sacrificial-System-and-Atonement doctrine and the baseline’s Critical-tier grace doctrine collide in a single high-visibility noun at the center of the core passage (Lev 16:2, 13–15). Misteaching here would corrupt both doctrines simultaneously.
-
血 (blood) — atoning medium vs. folk blood-oath/potency substance — High. Leviticus 17’s foundational “the life is in the blood” claim underlies the entire sacrificial system; Chinese folk vocabulary (血誓, 歇血为盟) treats blood as a bonding or magically potent substance, a categorically different (though superficially similar) concept.
-
赎罪 (atonement) — God-ordained substitutionary mechanism vs. secular “making amends” — Critical. Modern secular Mandarin uses 赎罪 loosely for an offender voluntarily compensating for a wrong through personal effort (community service, restitution, public apology) — precisely the earned-remedy framework Leviticus’s blood-mediated, God-initiated kipper rules out. This risk recurs at extremely high frequency (near-every-chapter) given the term’s centrality.
-
许愿 (vow) vs. temple bargaining-vow (还愿 logic) — High. Chapter 27’s climactic vow legislation risks being read through the transactional, conditional logic of temple vow-fulfillment (promise-for-favor, repaid upon receipt) rather than as an unconditional promise kept regardless of outcome.
-
祭物/供物 and the 祭 cluster vs. 祭祖/上供 (ancestor and folk-deity offerings) — High. The most cognitively available religious-ritual script for a Mandarin reader without Christian background is the ancestor-veneration or folk-temple offering script; Leviticus’s entire sacrificial vocabulary sits directly adjacent to this script and must be actively distinguished at every occurrence, not merely at first introduction.
-
邻舍 vs. 邻居 (neighbor) — scope-narrowing risk — High. Because 邻居 is the term a modern reader will produce unprompted, translators and teachers must actively resist the more natural-sounding word in order to preserve 19:18’s covenant-community scope and its later universalizing trajectory.
-
禧年 vs. 新年 (Jubilee false-friend) — Medium-High. Lower doctrinal stakes than items 1–9 (this is a comprehension risk, not a worldview-collision risk), but flagged because of high visual/phonetic proximity and the high cultural salience of 新年, making misreading unusually likely without a numeric gloss (“the fiftieth year”) at every occurrence.
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圣 cluster density (圣洁/至圣所/圣安息日/分别为圣) vs. 圣人/清净 — High, ranked below items 1–9 only because the baseline package already establishes the core fencing for 圣洁/成圣; Leviticus’s contribution is frequency intensification (the holiness refrain recurs far more densely here than in Romans) rather than a wholly new collision.
-
刻苦己心 vs. 苦行 (Buddhist ascetic self-mortification) — Medium-High. Lower ranking reflects narrower textual footprint (concentrated in ch. 16 and its calendar echo at 23:27) compared to items above, but the collision is doctrinally sharp: commanded, repentant self-denial within an already God-initiated rite versus a self-generated technique for merit or enlightenment.
7. Summary and Handoff
- 7 genuine missing-vocabulary gaps identified (§2), all resolved by periphrasis/compounding rather than single-word substitution; none require a wholly novel coinage.
- 8 crowded semantic neighborhoods identified (§3) requiring active fencing beyond what the baseline Romans package already establishes, most acutely the 圣 cluster, the 祭 cluster, and the 替罪羊 idiom.
- Transliteration is reserved for the covenant Name (耶和华) and genuinely contested proper nouns (阿撒泻勒, 摩洛); all other technical vocabulary uses established or newly-fenced paraphrase compounds.
- 12 ranked ambiguities (§6) are submitted as the priority list for
doctrine_risk_registry.jsonextension and Phase 2 validation-rule design; items 1–6 are recommended for mandatory theologian review at every occurrence, item 3 additionally for a dedicated automated string-check. - This analysis should be read alongside
08_core_glossary.md(full term inventory) andassets/bible_term_registry.json(per-term registry entries) before Phase 2 translation memory finalization.