mighty, or a great deal of something: great by sheer mass, whether in overpowering force or in plain amount
This is a rare word from the high end of Hebrew poetry. All ten of its appearances sit in just two books, seven in Job and three in Isaiah, and it never turns up in narrative or law. Where an ordinary writer would say "many" or "great" (רַב), the poets who reached for this word wanted something grander: a thing that has grown past the normal measure.
The root behind it means "to be much, to be many," and that is the thread running through every use. Something is great because there is so much of it. So much water that it sweeps a country away, so much money that a man's hand is full of it, so many days behind a man that he outstrips another's father. Sheer amount shades into sheer force, which is how one word can mean both "mighty" and "a great deal." Hebrew has a second adjective that fuses those same two ideas (עָצוּם), so the pairing is a habit of the language rather than an oddity of this one word.
The same word measures very different things:
- the wind that Bildad says Job's speeches amount to
- the floodwater God unleashes in Isaiah's storm oracles
- the fortune a rich man has piled up with his own hand
- the crowd of years that makes one man older than another's father
- the powerful men God shatters without holding an inquiry
Elihu makes the most of that range. In the same run of speeches he calls God mighty and calls the human power brokers mighty too, then watches God break them without so much as an investigation (Job 34:24; Job 36:5). The word is doing the argument's work: human greatness and God's greatness are being set on one scale, and only one of them holds up.