a.mal describes exerting effort in work, building, cultivation, or a pursuit whose outcome may remain beyond reach.

The verb denotes exertion in work or a sustained undertaking: hands work, builders labor on a house, a person may labor over a plant, and someone may exert effort to seek out what cannot be found. Several Ecclesiastes clauses place such exertion beside limited profit, loss of control over its results, or inability to attain the object sought.

1. Exerting effort in work or an undertaking · dominant

   In Ecclesiastes 2:11, the first-person perfect form occurs as the speaker reviews the work done by his hands and the effort expended in doing it; the APB renders the verse's outcome as having “no profit under the sun.” In Ecclesiastes 2:19, Ecclesiastes 2:21, and Psalm 127:1, the verb concerns labor whose results may pass to another or prove vain without the LORD's building. Ecclesiastes 8:17 extends the same exertion to seeking out God's deed, yet the seeker does not find it; Jonah 4:10 places it in the denial that Jonah had labored for or caused the plant to grow.

   Ecclesiastes 2:11Ecclesiastes 2:19Ecclesiastes 2:21Ecclesiastes 8:17Jonah 4:10Psalm 127:1

In the Anselm Project Bible: The APB presents the verb through labor-and-effort language, including “toils,” “labored,” and “the toil I had expended.” These renderings confirm the clauses' portrayal of exertion but do not establish separate lexical senses.