to toil: to wear oneself out working hard at something
This verb names effort that costs you. It is not the ordinary word for holding a job or serving in a role, which is "avad" (עָבַד). This one is for working until you are worn down, and it nearly always arrives with a question attached: what does all that effort actually get you?
Ecclesiastes uses it more than every other book combined, usually paired with its matching noun "amal" (עָמָל) in the deliberately circular phrase "the toil at which he toils." The writer keeps turning the same complaint over:
- he toils under the sun and cannot say what he has gained by it
- he toils for the wind and comes away holding nothing
- he toils to work out what God is doing and never finds out
- he toils with skill and then hands the whole estate to someone who never worked for it
That last complaint shows the second thing this verb does. Hebrew often names the very thing a person worked at, and once the object is in view the word stops describing an activity and starts asserting a claim: I poured myself into this, so it is mine. God turns exactly that logic back on Jonah, who pitied a plant he had not worked for and had not grown.
The word is not only bleak, though. Proverbs treats hunger as an honest motivator that keeps a worker at his task, Ecclesiastes says a person should eat and drink and find good in all the work he does, and Psalm 127 says the builders' effort is wasted only when the Lord is not the one building. Hard work is real and can be enjoyed. What this word refuses is the assumption that effort by itself guarantees a payoff.