אוֹי
oy
woe!
Lexicon Entry
Lexicon data from STEPBible TIPNR, Tyndale House, Cambridge. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
What Original Readers Understood
Supported# אוֹי (oy) — "Woe!" The Hebrew interjection אוֹי expresses distress or lamentation, functioning as an exclamation rather than a standard word with grammatical inflection. Its translation as "woe!" captures its essential communicative purpose: to voice sorrow, calamity, or deep concern. As an interjection, it operates at the emotional and rhetorical level of language, serving to convey immediate human suffering or alarm rather than to describe or analyze it. With 24 occurrences in the biblical text, אוֹי appears with sufficient regularity to establish it as a conventional expression within Hebrew discourse. This frequency suggests the word held recognized cultural and linguistic significance—speakers and writers drew upon it readily to articulate moments of crisis or despair. The relative consistency of its usage across different biblical contexts indicates that it functioned as a stable, understood utterance for expressing acute distress. The significance of אוֹי lies in its role as a linguistic marker of emotional intensity and social awareness. When speakers employed this interjection, they signaled not merely personal feeling but often communal concern—mourning losses, prophetic warnings, or responses to injustice. As a simple but potent exclamation, it provided biblical writers a direct means to register human anguish within their narratives and speeches.
Source data & methodology
Occurrences in Scripture
24 total occurrences across the text
Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaints? Who has needless bruises? Who has bloodshot eyes?
Isaiah 3:9The look of their faces testify against them. They parade their sin like Sodom. They don’t hide it. Woe to their soul! For they have brought disaster upon themselves.
Isaiah 3:11Woe to the wicked! Disaster is upon them; for the deeds of his hands will be paid back to him.
Isaiah 6:5Then I said, “Woe is me! For I am undone, because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips: for my eyes have seen the King, Yahweh of Armies!”
Jeremiah 4:13Behold, he will come up as clouds, and his chariots will be as the whirlwind. His horses are swifter than eagles. Woe to us! For we are ruined.
Jeremiah 4:31For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, the anguish as of her who gives birth to her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion, who gasps for breath, who spreads her hands, saying, “Woe is me now! For my soul faints before the murderers.”
Jeremiah 6:4“Prepare war against her! Arise! Let’s go up at noon. Woe to us! For the day declines, for the shadows of the evening are stretched out.
Jeremiah 10:19Woe is me because of my injury! My wound is serious; but I said, “Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it.”
Jeremiah 13:27I have seen your abominations, even your adulteries, and your neighing, the lewdness of your prostitution, on the hills in the field. Woe to you, Jerusalem! You will not be made clean. How long will it yet be?”
Jeremiah 15:10Woe is me, my mother, that you have borne me, a man of strife, and a man of contention to the whole earth! I have not lent, neither have men lent to me; yet every one of them curses me.
Jeremiah 45:3‘You said, “Woe is me now! For Yahweh has added sorrow to my pain! I am weary with my groaning, and I find no rest.” ’
Jeremiah 48:46Woe to you, O Moab! The people of Chemosh are undone; for your sons are taken away captive, and your daughters into captivity.
Lamentations 5:16The crown has fallen from our head. Woe to us, for we have sinned!
Ezekiel 16:23“ ‘ “It has happened after all your wickedness. Woe, woe to you!” says the Lord Yahweh,
Ezekiel 16:23“ ‘ “It has happened after all your wickedness. Woe, woe to you!” says the Lord Yahweh,
Ezekiel 24:6“ ‘Therefore the Lord Yahweh says: “Woe to the bloody city, to the cauldron whose rust is in it, and whose rust hasn’t gone out of it! Take out of it piece after piece. No lot is fallen on it.
Ezekiel 24:9“ ‘Therefore the Lord Yahweh says: “Woe to the bloody city! I also will make the pile great.
Hosea 7:13Woe to them! For they have wandered from me. Destruction to them! For they have trespassed against me. Though I would redeem them, yet they have spoken lies against me.
Hosea 9:12Though they bring up their children, yet I will bereave them, so that not a man shall be left. Indeed, woe also to them when I depart from them!
Isaiah 24:16From the uttermost part of the earth have we heard songs. Glory to the righteous! But I said, “I pine away! I pine away! woe is me!” The treacherous have dealt treacherously. Yes, the treacherous have dealt very treacherously.
Numbers 21:29Woe to you, Moab! You are undone, people of Chemosh! He has given his sons as fugitives, and his daughters into captivity, to Sihon king of the Amorites.
Numbers 24:23He took up his parable, and said, “Alas, who shall live when God does this?
1 Samuel 4:7The Philistines were afraid, for they said, “God has come into the camp.” They said, “Woe to us! For there has not been such a thing before.
1 Samuel 4:8Woe to us! Who shall deliver us out of the hand of these mighty gods? These are the gods that struck the Egyptians with all kinds of plagues in the wilderness.