tohu

At its heart תֹהוּ (tohu) names emptiness: a place or thing drained of its proper contents, and so unable to do what it should. A desert cannot support life, an idol cannot save, a lying witness cannot bring justice, and an unfinished earth cannot yet be a home. English has no single word for this, so translators reach for "without form," "waste," "vanity," "nothing," or "confusion" depending on the verse.

The concrete end of the range is a trackless wasteland, the kind of deadly, directionless country where travelers wander off the road and die, harsher than ordinary open wilderness (מִדְבָּר). The abstract end is worthlessness: something with no substance to it, close in spirit to the emptiness of a mere breath (הֶבֶל). The prophet Isaiah stretches this second sense into a weapon, using the word for the hollowness of everything that is not God, whether foreign idols, mighty nations, or wasted human effort. One verse gives the Bible's own definition by opposite: God did not make the world empty, He formed it to be lived in.

The most argued use is cosmic. At the start of Genesis the earth is "formless and empty," the same pairing Jeremiah later reverses when he pictures the ordered world collapsing back into ruin. Here the word travels with its companion term (בֹּהוּ, "void"). Scholars divide over whether this pictures a pre-existent chaos that God had to master or simply an unfinished, unfurnished earth God has only begun to shape. The older rendering "chaos" leans toward the first; the wording of the text itself, and the closest related languages, lean toward the second.