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# welter

«welter» in Mova's judaism dictionary: **Disorder or a confused mess** — its meaning for a pupil, its sense in the lessons and examples.

### part of speech

noun

### meaning for a pupil

Disorder or a confused mess. [tree →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/judaism/W/welter/#m1)

### sense in the lessons

In the Tanakh and 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.

### examples

- 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 →](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/judaism/W/welter/#x1)

### note

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

### Trees and pragmatics

[Every meaning and example of «welter» parsed by Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/dictionaries/judaism/W/welter/), each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.