amel

The standard lexica treat ע־מ־ל as a single polysemous root covering wearing labor, the trouble it brings, and (chiefly in the Psalms) harm inflicted on others; BDB accordingly carries one entry rather than a homonym split, and Ronald B. Allen's TWOT article (no. 1639) characterizes the root as denoting "the dark side of labor" rather than the nobility of work, over against the more neutral עָבַד and עָשָׂה. Within the root three forms must be kept distinct: the verb עָמַל, the abstract noun עָמָל (55x), and the verbal adjective or agent noun עָמֵל treated here, which is rare (9x) and clusters in Qohelet. Because the consonantal text is identical, form identification is itself an exegetical judgment, most acutely at Ecclesiastes 2:18 and 2:22, where the suffixed noun and the adjective stand side by side. BDB glosses the form as "toiling", used substantivally of a labourer (Proverbs 16:26), in the plural of workmen (Judges 5:26), and as "sufferer" (Job 3:20; 20:22); Judges 5:26 carries a long-standing text-critical discussion, since the parallel colon's tent peg invites a concrete tool rather than the men who own it. Michael V. Fox (Anchor Yale Bible) and Bruce K. Waltke (NICOT) read Proverbs 16:26 as a wisdom observation in which hunger functions as a motivator, one of the few neutral-to-positive uses of this form. In Qohelet the form participates in the book's central accounting question (yitron set against amal), on which scholarship divides three ways: a futility reading (Fox, A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up, where amal is labor "tainted by frustration or futility"; Longman, NICOT), a neutral-realist reading (Murphy, WBC; Seow, Anchor Bible, who also hears an acquisition nuance following the Gordon and Rainey appeal to Akkadian nemelu "profit, gain"), and a gift reading built on the enjoyment refrains (Lohfink; Schwienhorst-Schoenberger; Whybray). Two cautions carry over from the comparative material: whether nemelu is a true cognate of ע־מ־ל or only a semantic parallel is unsettled, and Hebrew is the outlier in negativity, since Arabic amal and Aramaic or Syriac amal sit in the neutral "work, do" range. The Septuagint's split rendering of the root, kopos, mochthos and ponos for the toil sense against anomia and adikia for the mischief sense, shows that ancient readers already perceived the division within the family, although the mischief sense attaches to the noun and not to this form.