parar

This is the word for cancelling something that was supposed to stand. Its objects are almost always commitments and intentions: a covenant, a vow, a command, or somebody's carefully laid plans. To break a covenant here does not mean to crack it physically but to treat it as void, to act as though it no longer obligates anyone.

The same act looks different depending on who does it and to what. When people break a covenant or a law, it is a betrayal: they tear up an agreement they were bound to keep. When a husband annuls his wife's vow in the law of Numbers, it is a formal, legitimate cancelling: he has the standing to release her from a promise. And when God frustrates the plans of nations or crafty schemers, he simply makes their plans come to nothing, however clever they were.

What ties these uses together is the idea of nullifying: taking something that was meant to be in force and rendering it powerless. A few times the word is even turned on God's own commitments, as a plea or a protest: do not break your covenant with us, or, dare you cancel my justice to prove yourself right?

In its passive form the same word describes the thing being undone: a covenant that is broken off, or, in one vivid line about old age, desire itself that simply fails.

A small number of passages use the word for literal, violent breaking: not the cancelling of an agreement but the smashing of a thing. Here the earth cracks and is torn apart, a body is seized and shattered, and the sea is split open at creation.

This is the same verb as the more common annul sense, but the picture is physical force rather than legal cancelling. English needs a different word for it, shatter or split rather than annul, which is why the standard dictionaries treat it as a distinct strand of the word.