water: the physical substance and its extended uses as a purifying agent and a symbol of divine life
Hudor covers the full range that "water" does in ordinary experience, rivers, seas, rain, wells, and drinking water, but the New Testament concentrates its uses on three overlapping registers. Water is first the simple physical element of daily life and the natural world, present in storms, pools, and household vessels. It is also the specific medium through which baptism and ritual washing take place, a use that gave water a charged theological weight long before the New Testament built on it. And in the Gospel of John especially, Jesus redefines water as a figure for the divine gift he brings: the life of God freely given to those who come to him.
These three registers are not competing definitions: they are one substance seen at different angles. John 4 famously plays all three at once: a woman comes to a well for ordinary water, Jesus offers her "living water" (a real idiom for fresh running water), and the conversation pivots on the gap between the physical and the spiritual. The Revelation visions use water both literally (seas, rivers, floods as cosmic realities) and symbolically (the "water of life" given freely at the end of history mirrors Jesus's offer in John 4). The constant across every use is that water is fundamental, life-giving, and irreplaceable, which is precisely why it becomes the vehicle for the most basic claims about what Jesus offers.