StrongerBible

amal

עָמָל

HebrewH5999“toil, trouble, ...”

Appears 55 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 41:51Num 23:21Deu 26:7Jdg 10:16Job 3:10Job 4:8Job 5:6Job 5:7Job 7:3Job 11:16Job 15:35Job 16:2Psa 7:14(15)Psa 7:16(17)Psa 10:7Psa 10:14Psa 25:18Psa 73:5Psa 105:44Psa 140:9(10)Pro 31:7Ecc 1:3Ecc 2:10 (2×)Ecc 2:18Ecc 2:19Ecc 2:21Ecc 2:22Ecc 2:24Ecc 3:13Ecc 4:8Ecc 4:9Ecc 5:15(14)Ecc 5:18(17)Ecc 5:19(18)Ecc 6:7Ecc 8:15Ecc 9:9Ecc 10:15Isa 53:11
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeah-MAHLnoun

What amal means

1

wearing toil: hard work that drains a person, the misery that comes with it, and what such work finally yields

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

Hebrew has calmer words for work. This one has a built-in wince. It is not simply doing a job but grinding away at it and feeling the cost, so writers who reached for it were usually choosing the word for the dark side of labor rather than the dignity of it.

Because of that, the same noun can point in three directions, and the sentence has to tell you which:

  • the hard work itself, from the daily grind to the crushing labor of slavery in Egypt
  • the misery a person carries, whether or not any job produced it
  • what the work finally leaves behind, the earnings a person must hand on to an heir

Ecclesiastes made this the hinge word of its argument, asking what a person really gains from all the toil under the sun. Job, Jeremiah and the psalmists lean the other way, using it for raw distress: the trouble a sufferer bears, the affliction he asks God to look at. Where the accent falls on the payoff rather than the sweat, the closest neighbor word is the one for what labor earns (יְגִיעַ), and here the two nearly touch.

The thread running through all of it is the burden. Whether a person is worn out by work, crushed by grief, or counting hard-won property he cannot keep, the word frames human life as something costly that has to be carried.

Nuances

1athe labor itself: hard, wearing work, from the daily grind to forced labor
Deu 26:7Psa 73:16Psa 107:12Ecc 1:3Ecc 2:10 (2×)Ecc 2:11Ecc 2:20Ecc 2:22Ecc 2:24Ecc 3:13Ecc 4:4Ecc 4:6
1bthe trouble a person suffers: misery, grief, and hardship borne through life
Gen 41:51Jdg 10:16Job 3:10Job 5:6Job 5:7Job 7:3Job 11:16Job 16:2Psa 25:18Psa 73:5Psa 90:10Pro 31:7
1cthe fruit of the work: what a person's labor earns or produces, named by the effort that won it
Psa 105:44Ecc 2:18Ecc 2:19Ecc 2:21Ecc 5:15(14)

Disputed

Whether in Ecclesiastes the noun also denotes acquired property or gain, and not only effort and its results by ordinary metonymy.

  • majorityThe standard lexica list toil, trouble, and mischief as the semantic range; where the word denotes the results of labor this is the normal metonymic step from the activity to its product, and no separate "profit/property" sense is required.; BDB, s.v. עמל; HALOT, s.v. עמל
  • minorityQoheleth's usage carries a mercantile nuance of acquisition, clearest in 2:18-21 where the ʿamal is something bequeathed to an heir; this is often connected with Akkadian nemelu, "profit, gain", and fits the book's dense economic vocabulary (yitron, heleq).; Anson F. Rainey, "A Second Look at Amal in Qoheleth," Concordia Theological Monthly 36 (1965): 805; Choon-Leong Seow, Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible 18C (New York: Doubleday, 1997)

How Qoheleth evaluates ʿamal: as futile, as the neutral human lot, or as a God-given portion to be enjoyed.

  • contestedThe word carries a negative tint throughout: labor tainted by frustration and futility, with the enjoyment refrains functioning as tentative concessions rather than the book's constructive core.; Michael V. Fox, A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999); Tremper Longman III, The Book of Ecclesiastes, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)
  • contestedʿamal is simply the human lot, neither condemned nor commended; "all is hebel" means beyond human grasp or control, and the appropriate response is to seize the God-given portion.; Roland E. Murphy, Ecclesiastes, WBC 23A (Dallas: Word, 1992); Choon-Leong Seow, Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible 18C (New York: Doubleday, 1997)
  • contestedThe "eat, drink, and find enjoyment in your ʿamal" refrains (2:24; 3:13; 5:17-19; 8:15; 9:9) are the book's constructive core: toil received as God's gift and enjoyed in the present is where meaning is found.; Norbert Lohfink, Qoheleth, Continental Commentaries (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); R. N. Whybray, "Qoheleth, Preacher of Joy," Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 23 (1982): 87-98
2

mischief: harm that one person deliberately schemes and works against another

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

The same noun has a second, darker use: not trouble a person suffers but trouble a person manufactures. Here the effort is real and the exhaustion is somebody else's. A wrongdoer plots, hides, and delivers the damage, and the word names the damage as the product of his labor.

The poets make this vivid with a birth image. The wicked man conceives this harm and gives birth to lies. It sits under his tongue, fills the streets of a city, and rides on his words. It travels in a fixed pair with the Hebrew word for iniquity (אָוֶן), and that company is usually the surest sign of which sense a verse has taken.

The ugliest version of it is legal. A ruler can write this harm into decrees, so that oppression is not merely done but enacted, with the paperwork of justice around it. The ancient Greek translators caught the whole division cleanly: where the sense was work or suffering they used words for labor and pain, and where it was this, they switched to words for lawlessness and injustice.

Nuances

2aharm schemed against others: malice conceived, hidden, and carried out by the wicked
Num 23:21Job 4:8Job 15:35Psa 7:14(15)Psa 7:16(17)Psa 10:7Psa 10:14Psa 55:10Psa 140:9(10)Pro 24:2Isa 59:4Hab 1:3
2boppression written into law: injustice framed as an official decree
Psa 94:20Isa 10:1

What scholars say about amal

The lexica treat ʿamal as a single polysemous noun rather than two homonyms. BDB files it as one entry running from labour/toil through trouble and sorrow to "trouble, mischief, as done to others", the last regularly parallel to אָוֶן (Ps 7:15; 10:7; 55:11; 94:20; Job 4:8; 15:35; Hab 1:13); HALOT and DCH likewise keep the toil-and-hardship uses and the malicious use within one semantic field. Ronald B. Allen (TWOT 1639) characterizes the root as denoting "the drudgery of toil rather than the nobility of labor", by contrast with the more neutral עבד and עשׂה, and the distribution is telling: of 55 occurrences of the noun, roughly 21 fall in Qoheleth, 13 in the Psalms, and 8 in Job. The LXX supplies ancient evidence for the toil/wrongdoing division, rendering the word with κόπος, μόχθος, and πόνος in the labour-and-suffering passages but with ἀνομία, ἀδικία, and πονηρία where the sense is harm inflicted on others. Comparative Semitic material shows Hebrew as the outlier in negativity: Arabic ʿamila / ʿamal is neutral-to-positive "work, deed", and Aramaic-Syriac ʿamal likewise lacks the dominant misery tint. Akkadian nemelu, "profit, gain", underlies the Gordon-Rainey proposal that Qoheleth's ʿamal connotes acquisition, but whether nemelu is formally cognate with ʿ-m-l or merely a semantic parallel remains unsettled, so it is best treated as suggestive. Form-identification is a live exegetical problem, since the consonantal text does not distinguish the noun עָמָל from the agent adjective עָמֵל; the two stand side by side in Ecc 2:18-22. At Isa 53:11 the noun denotes the servant's anguished labour (LXX ἀπὸ τοῦ πόνου τῆς ψυχῆς αὐτοῦ), and the verse carries a separate textual crux: 1QIsaa, 1QIsab, 4QIsad and the Vorlage of the LXX add אור, "he shall see light", which most recent critics judge original and lost from the MT by haplography (so Goldingay-Payne, Blenkinsopp). On the Qoheleth debate, Schoors accepts genuine Aramaisms and a late Hebrew for the book while rejecting both the translated-from-Aramaic theory and Dahood's Phoenician thesis, whose specific philological proposals for the Psalms occurrences are largely set aside today.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB, s.v. עמלlexicon
  • HALOT, s.v. עמלlexicon
  • DCH, s.v. עמלlexicon
  • Ronald B. Allen, "ʿāmal," TWOT, entry 1639theological-dictionary
  • S. M. Schwertner, "עמל ʿāmāl," TLOT 2:925-927theological-dictionary
  • Anson F. Rainey, "A Second Look at Amal in Qoheleth," Concordia Theological Monthly 36 (1965): 805journal-article
  • Michael V. Fox, A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999)monograph
  • Choon-Leong Seow, Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible 18C (New York: Doubleday, 1997)commentary
  • Tremper Longman III, The Book of Ecclesiastes, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)commentary
  • Roland E. Murphy, Ecclesiastes, WBC 23A (Dallas: Word, 1992)commentary
  • David J. A. Clines, Job 1-20, WBC 17 (Dallas: Word, 1989)commentary
  • John Goldingay and David Payne, Isaiah 40-55, ICC, 2 vols. (London: T&T Clark, 2006)commentary
  • Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40-55, Anchor Bible 19A (New York: Doubleday, 2002)commentary
  • Antoon Schoors, The Preacher Sought to Find Pleasing Words, 2 vols., Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta (Leuven: Peeters, 1992-2004)monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of עָמָל

c s absolute

עָמָל

Num 23:21, Job 3:10, Job 4:8, Job 5:6, Job 5:7, Job 7:3, Job 11:16, Job 15:35

c s construct

עֲמָלוֹ

Psa 7:16, Pro 31:7, Ecc 1:3, Ecc 2:21, Ecc 2:22, Ecc 2:24, Ecc 3:13, Ecc 4:8

c s construct

עֲמַל

Jdg 10:16, Psa 73:5, Psa 105:44, Psa 140:9, Ecc 6:7, Ecc 10:15, Isa 53:11

c s construct

עֲמָלִי

Gen 41:51, Psa 25:18, Ecc 2:10, Ecc 2:10, Ecc 2:18, Ecc 2:19

c s construct

עֲמָלֵנוּ

Deu 26:7

c s construct

עֲמָלְךָ

Ecc 9:9

c s construct

עֲמָלָם

Ecc 4:9