nothing

Distinctions

The second essay opens by acknowledging the Mishnah (Chagigah 2:1), that asking what came before the Creation of the world and what will be after it expires is not a worthwhile course of study; the discussion proceeds because the Torah itself (Bereishis 1:2) tells us the world was tohu and bohu.

hevel (הבל)

Rabbi Avraham Bedersi (Chosam Tochnis) works from word order: where two near-synonyms stand together Tanach lists them from weaker to stronger, and the one place hevel and rik are adjacent (Yeshayahu 30:7; cf. 49:4) has hevel first, as does Aleinu. So hevel is a thing that is (yesh) but has no to'eles, while rik does not even exist. Shadal: hevel is specifically what looks advantageous on the surface and is finally shown to be worthless, as beauty is hevel (Mishlei 31:30). On that reading Shadal explains the name Hevel (Bereishis 4:2): Adam thought him a founder of the righteous, and he was killed before fathering a child; Shadal infers that the name was given in retrospect, which is why Tanach does not report Chavah naming him as it does for Kayin (4:1) and Sheis (4:25). Malbim inverts the pair: hevel is total nothingness of no value whatever, and rik is what carries surface value until one looks deeper.

rik (ריק)

Shadal: rik is toiling hard for a result that comes to nothing, as in the tochachah, "you shall sow your seed larik, for your enemies will eat it" (Vayikra 26:16). It repeatedly stands beside yegiah, toil (Yeshayahu 49:4, 65:23; Iyov 39:16), and that pairing carries into Uva LeTzion, that we not toil larik. Targum Onkelos renders bohu of Bereishis 1:2 as reikanya, an Aramaic form of reik.

efes (אפס)

Aleinu: "our King is true, efes zulaso," there is nothing besides Him. The series names efes as the third of the three words treated in Part 1, but the archived text of Part 1 breaks off before reaching it (see Sources), so nothing is on record here setting efes against hevel and rik. Do not manufacture a distinction the archived text does not draw.

tohu (תהו)

Twenty appearances in Tanach, eleven of them in Yeshayahu; only twice in Chumash, Bereishis 1:2 and Devarim 32:10, where Rashi has the Jews trusting Hashem into a place of tohu, the wilderness. Yeshayahu: Hashem did not create the world for tohu but to be settled (45:18), and idolatry is tohu (41:29, 44:9, 59:4). Readings: Rashi and Sefer HaBahir 2 read tohu as astonishment, what a man would feel seeing sheer nothingness; hence toheh al harishonos (Kiddushin 40b), regretting one's good deeds, and the Aramaic tahi bah that introduces a bewildered question (Berachos 38b, Eruvin 66a, and often). Ramban (to Bereishis 1:1) takes the philosophical approach: tohu is matter (chomer), what the Greek natural philosophers called hiyuli, hyle, a primordial first matter that was shaped to fashion everything in Creation, and bohu is form (tzurah); a name attaches only to what has both, so tohu, matter without form, cannot be named, and one encountering it could only wonder (toheh) what to call it. His explanation echoes the Zohar (Bereishis 16a) and his predecessor Rabbi Avraham bar Chiyya HaNasi (Higayon HaNefesh), who wrote the same thing. Ralbag (to 1:2) takes the exact opposite position, tohu as form and bohu as matter, and Abarbanel (there) rejects Ralbag. The Gemara (Yoma 54b) records a dispute over whether Hashem created the world from the middle outward or from the edges inward, filling in until He reached the middle; Rabbi Nissim of Marseilles (to 1:2) seemingly follows the first of these when he reads both words of the pre-Creation moment when the whole world was still concentrated at the center, waiting to expand (the column compares how scientists nowadays understand the Big Bang, and notes Rabbi Alexander Hool's argument that whereas modern science holds the universe still to be expanding, Judaism understands that it has stopped). On that reading tohu is the man frozen in place by wondering (toheh/tamah), unable to move right or left, before Hashem set the world expanding. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim takes the hei and vav as additions and the root as the single letter tav: an outline whose inner essence is not yet filled in, which fits the Gemara's tohu as the green line circumscribing the world (Chagigah 12a, on Yeshayahu 34:11). Shadal: tohu is pointless and brings no benefit. Rabbi Avraham bar Chiyya derives tehom, the sea depths, whose inflections appear thirty-six times in Tanach, from tohu, a shapeless disordered region; the final mem, he says, is like the mem of chinam and reikam, which are declensions of chein and reik.

bohu (בהו)

Only twice more in Tanach beyond Bereishis 1:2 (Yeshayahu 34:11; Yirmiyahu 4:23). Targum Onkelos: reikanya, empty. Rashi likewise reads it with reik. Sefer HaBahir 2: bohu has some minimal tangibility and is not wholly abstract. Rabbi Nissim of Marseilles: a contraction of bo and hu, everything still inside the center. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim: root the single letter beis, "inside," so bohu is an outer structure whose interior still has to be filled in, matching the Gemara's bohu as the wet stones from which water issues (Chagigah 12a). Shadal: bohu is worse than pointless, it is actually bad. Compare Sefer HaBahir 11-12, which links tohu with evil and bohu with peace, and 135 and 163, where tohu's evil is that it makes a man wonder and second-guess himself into sin. Targum Yonasan and Targum Neofiti simply Aramaicise both as tahya and bahya. Rabbi Moshe Botarel cites an otherwise unknown scholar, Rabbi Levi ben Shlomo of Lunel, for tohu as matter that has no shape but is destined to receive one and bohu as shape itself; and, since existence hinges on polar opposites, for tohu as absence against bohu as presence, Hashem tempering the balance between the two poles and so bringing the world into being. The column cautions that Botarel has been known to fabricate sources, so the citation might not be the most reliable.

blimah (בלימה)

A single appearance: Hashem "hangs the earth on blimah" (Iyov 26:7). On a simple level this means that Hashem actively suspends the earth in space, without its needing to lean on any other cosmic body. Rabbi Saadia Gaon, Ibn Ezra, Rabbi Moshe Kimchi (there) and Radak (Sefer HaShorashim) read it as bli plus mah, without anything, and it is sometimes written as two words; Rabbi Avraham bar Chiyya (Higayon HaNefesh) makes it synonymous with tohu. Rabbi Shabsai Donnolo (to Sefer Yetzirah): bli plus meumah, that Hashem alone built without tools or materials. Derash: Chazal (Chullin 89a) take it as one word from ב-ל-ם, to hold back (cognate at Tehillim 32:9), so the world hangs on the merit of one who holds back from answering an insult; see Rabbeinu Bachya to Devarim 33:27. Sefer Yetzirah calls the ten sefiros blimah, either because they are nothing independent of Hashem or as a warning to hold back from teaching esoterics to the uninitiated (Ramban to Sefer Yetzirah). The column adds that biblical blimah has nothing to do with the Yiddish girls' name Blima, also pronounced Blume (responsa Maharsham vol. 4 §50, vol. 8 §242), which comes from the Germanic cognates of English bloom and blossom; linguists trace those to a Proto-Indo-European root bhel, "thriving, blossoming," whose initial consonant became an f-sound in Greek and Latin, as beis and pei interchange in Hebrew, yielding flower, flour, foliage, folio, flora and flourish, and the name of the Roman goddess Flora.

meumah (מאומה) and klum (כלום)

Meumah means both "nothing" and "anything," because Hebrew permits the double negative that English does not. By Even-Shoshan's concordance it appears thirty-two times in Tanach, plus twice more without the final hei as meum (Iyov 31:7, Daniel 1:4). The most popular etymology traces it to the biliteral מ-ה, whence mah: so Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh of Carpentras (Ohalei Yehudah), a contraction of mah u'mah, "what and what." The German philologist Wilhelm Gesenius offers the same etymology in his lexicon of Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic, comparing the construction to the Latin quidquid. Rabbi Ernest Klein cites that explanation and rejects it on technical grounds. Rabbi Shlomo Pappenheim: the root is the biliteral mem-mem, the smallest amount, so meumah as "nothing" is really "not even something" (Bereishis 30:31, 39:23; I Melachim 10:21), the equivalent of Rabbinic mah shehu and kol shehu. Klum is the Mishnaic counterpart and behaves the same way. Rabbi Binyamin Mussafia (Musaf He'Aruch): a contraction of kol me'um, "nothing at all," a phrase in the Hebrew part of Daniel (1:4), cited approvingly by Rabbi Ernest Klein; Rabbi Yair Chaim Bachrach, author of the responsa Chavos Yair, disagrees in Mar Kashisha without offering a replacement. The column adds, as his own abandoned guess from before he studied the etymologies, that he had taken klum for a relative of kol and kulam, on the pattern by which a Hebrew root can carry an idea and its opposite, as shoresh is a root and misharesh is to uproot.

Rendering guidance

• הבל: "futility," or "vanity" in Koheles where the register is fixed. Not "nothing," which loses Bedersi's point that the thing does exist.
• לריק / ריק of effort: "for naught," "in vain." ריק of a vessel or a place: "empty."
• תהו ובהו: "formless and void" is the safe pair. If the passage follows Ramban, say so in the commentary ("unformed matter and form") rather than forcing it into the body text, since Ralbag holds the reverse.
• Trap: English "nothing" will swallow hevel, rik, efes, tohu and klum at once. Where two of them stand in one phrase (hevel varik in Aleinu), render them apart: "futility and emptiness," in that order, since the order is Bedersi's whole evidence.
• Second trap, grammatical: לא ... מאומה and לא ... כלום are single negatives in Hebrew. Render "he did not have anything" or "he had nothing," never "he did not have nothing."
• Where a source darshens blimah as holding back (Chullin 89a), do not translate it "nothingness" in that line; the derashah needs "restraint."

Sources

Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, "An Article About Nothing (Part 1 of 2)," What's in a Word?, Ohr Somayach, 23 Elul 5783 (2023-09-09), https://articles.ohr.edu/articles/an-article-about-nothing-part-1-of-2, and "An Article About Nothing (Part 2 of 2)," 1 Tishrei 5784 (2023-09-16), https://articles.ohr.edu/articles/an-article-about-nothing-part-2-of-2; raw text in sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/11095-an-article-about-nothing-part-1-of-2.md and sources/whats-in-a-word/raw/11087-an-article-about-nothing-part-2-of-2.md. Primary loci cited: Yeshayahu 30:7, 49:4, 65:23, 45:18, 41:29, 44:9, 59:4, 34:11; Mishlei 31:30; Bereishis 4:1-2, 4:25, 1:2, 30:31, 39:23; Vayikra 26:16; Devarim 32:10; Iyov 39:16, 26:7, 31:7; Yirmiyahu 4:23; Tehillim 32:9; Daniel 1:4; I Melachim 10:21; Chagigah 2:1 and 12a; Yoma 54b; Kiddushin 40b; Chullin 89a.

The citations of Wilhelm Gesenius and of Even-Shoshan's concordance, and the Proto-Indo-European excursus on the name Blima, had been dropped from an earlier version of this entry under a mistaken sources rule; they are restored above, since the column cites them.

One caveat on the archive. The stored raw text of Part 1 is the print digest, which breaks off after the Malbim with a pointer to the full article online, so what it carries of efes is only the opening line naming it alongside hevel and rik. The entry therefore says nothing about how efes is distinguished from them; a full copy of Part 1 may have more.