dunamai

At its core this word marks the line between what someone or something can and cannot do. It covers raw ability of every kind: bodily strength, skill, opportunity, and the room a situation leaves open. The senses below are not different words but different places that line gets drawn. Most often it is plain capability, the strength or means to act. Sometimes it shifts to the thing itself and asks whether a situation is even possible. And sometimes the limit is not strength at all but what is allowed or fitting, so that "cannot" means "may not" or "is in no position to."

The New Testament leans hard on this word to map human limits against God's power. People repeatedly run up against what they cannot do, and the answer turns on God: "Who then can be saved?" meets "With God all things are possible." The healing requests put it sharply, "if you are willing, you can make me clean," where the issue is never whether Jesus has the strength but whether he chooses to use it.

Because the senses shade into one another, a single verse can sit comfortably in more than one. "No one can serve two masters" is at once a statement of practical impossibility and a moral verdict on divided loyalty. The shared center holds them together: in every use, something stands either within reach or beyond it.