welter

noun

«welter» in the English dictionary: in Jewish tradition — its meanings, how the lessons use it, and examples, each with its tree on Mova.

In Jewish tradition

It is used in a translation of Genesis 1:2, "waste and welter," for the Hebrew tohu vavohu.

Interpretation. Tradition reads tohu vavohu as the formless state before God gave order to the world, and Sefer Yetzirah speaks of it too.

Disorder or a confused mess. tree →

Most literally, it means ‘waste(land)’, the lifeless open desert, a translation of [Genesis 1:2] so far captured in English only by Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible (2019), who poetically renders תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ tohu vavohu as “waste and welter”; cf. (Sefer Yetzirah, Sefaria community translation) tree →

A record of the Judaism dictionary, written from the corpus.