01 — Executive Summary: Leviticus (English → Mandarin)

Why it matters

Leviticus supplies the sacrificial, priestly, and holiness vocabulary that the rest of the Bible — including the Romans curriculum already in production — assumes as background. Its core passage, the Day of Atonement (16:1–34), contains the single most intertextually load-bearing term in the Old Testament for this Language Package: the mercy seat (施恩座), whose LXX rendering (ἱλαστήριον) is the exact word Paul applies to Christ in Romans 3:25. Get Leviticus’s Mandarin vocabulary wrong, and downstream Romans teaching on grace and atonement inherits the error. Chinese folk religion, Confucianism, and Daoism supply abundant but actively misleading vocabulary for this book’s core categories — merit-accumulation (功德) for atonement, self-cultivated sagehood (成圣) for holiness, ancestor/temple offering scripts (祭祖, 上供) for sacrifice, and an unjust-blame idiom (替罪羊) for the one doctrine most requiring accurate substitution language. This is a high-stakes translation surface, not a routine one.

Key findings

• Full-book coverage complete: all 27 chapters of Leviticus reviewed; every chapter contributes to or reinforces at least one of 27 tracked doctrines (7 Critical, 11 High, 6 Medium, 3 Low), anchored in but not limited to the core passage.
• Translation memory extended to 66 enforced terms (9 inherited verbatim from the Romans baseline + 57 new Leviticus-specific terms), of which 44 terms (12 Critical + 32 High) require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence — two-thirds of the entire enforced glossary.
• Single highest-risk term in the curriculum: 替罪羊 (scapegoat) — the only available native Mandarin idiom for this concept carries the opposite moral valence (unjust blame of an innocent party) from the divinely appointed, willingly enacted substitutionary rite of Leviticus 16.
• Highest-density theological formula: “I am the LORD your God” (耶和华), recurring roughly 50 times concentrated in chs. 18–26, must never collapse into the generic title 主 or the impersonal 天 — this is the book’s central rhetorical mechanism for grounding ethics in God’s own identity rather than an abstract moral order.
• Sharpest cross-cultural collision cluster: substitutionary atonement (chs. 1–17), holiness-as-gift (chs. 10–11, 19–21), and personal-God-grounded ethics (the Divine Name formula) have no structural equivalent in Confucian, Daoist, folk-Chinese, or Buddhist frameworks, which default to merit-accumulation, karma, or self-cultivation logics instead.

Risks

• Doctrinal corruption via homograph: 洁净 (clean, God-declared status) and 清净 (Daoist/Buddhist meditative purity) differ by one character; this is a plausible proofreading failure, not only a conceptual one, and requires a dedicated automated string-check, not human review alone.
• Grace/merit collapse at the most visible noun in the core passage: 施恩座 (mercy seat) shares its root with 恩典 (grace, Critical) and sits one metaphor away from 功德/阴德 (merit accumulation) — a mistranslation here would corrupt both the Sacrificial System doctrine and the baseline Grace doctrine simultaneously.
• Priesthood conflation: the culturally “available” Mandarin vocabulary for a religious ritual specialist (和尚, 道士, 巫师) all imply merit-generation or fee-for-service ritual power explicitly foreign to the Levitical 祭司, and are more intuitively “reachable” for an untrained reader than the correct term.
• Vow-bargain collapse: 许愿 (vow) is the same word Chinese readers use for a conditional temple bargain-vow (还愿 logic); Leviticus 27’s unconditional vow risks being read as a negotiated exchange for divine favor.

Opportunities

• Intertextual teaching bridge already in place: the 施恩座/ἱλαστήριον/Romans 3:25 link lets this curriculum teach Leviticus and Romans as a single coherent unit rather than two disconnected books — a strong pedagogical asset if surfaced explicitly in every lesson touching either term.
• Israel’s own contrast case sharpens the message: Leviticus’s explicit, repeated prohibition of human sacrifice (Molech, chs. 18, 20) gives Mandarin readers a built-in, low-risk teaching device for clarifying why animal substitution — not merit, not appeasement — is the sacrificial system’s operative logic.
• CUV vocabulary is already settled and available: over a century of Union Version usage means most of this book’s technical terms (燔祭, 素祭, 赎罪祭, 至圣所, 施恩座) already exist as stable, community-recognized compounds — the translation task is defending and glossing existing good vocabulary, not inventing new terms.

Recommended actions

1. Load translation_memory.json v2 and the Leviticus doctrine_risk_registry.json before any Phase 2 segment work begins; treat the 44 Critical/High terms as absolute-enforcement, no-substitution items.
2. Route the entirety of Leviticus 16:1–34 to human theologian review with no exceptions, given its status as both the core passage and the doctrinal anchor for three Critical doctrines (Day of Atonement, Scapegoat, Priesthood).
3. Implement the automated 洁净/清净 string-check as a standing Phase 2 validation rule, independent of human proofreading.
4. Require the mandatory clarifying-clause footnote for every doctrinal use of 替罪羊, 赎罪, 施恩座, 耶和华, 许愿, and 祭司 per the updated AI instruction set (12_ai_translation_requirements.md).
5. Brief native speaker reviewers specifically on the Jubilee/New Year (禧年/新年) and neighbor/neighbor-next-door (邻舍/邻居) false-friend risks, which are comprehension risks rather than worldview-collision risks and can be resolved with a numeric or scope gloss rather than escalation to theologian review.