oy

This is one of the most raw and human words in the Hebrew Bible. It is not really built from a root the way most words are; it is a sound, an involuntary cry that bursts out of a person when disaster strikes, much like the English "oh no!" or the Yiddish "oy" (which comes from the very same family of sounds). Scholars call this an onomatopoeic interjection: the meaning simply is the sound of someone in pain. English Bibles almost always render it "woe" or "alas."

Across its uses the word does the same basic thing, but it points in three directions. Most often it is the sufferers' own cry over their own trouble: "woe is me," "woe to us." This is the sound Isaiah makes when he sees God and feels undone, the sound the Philistines make in panic before the ark, the sound the people of Jerusalem make as they confess their sin in the rubble of the city. Less often it is aimed outward at someone else, a "woe to you" spoken over an enemy or an evildoer, as when the word is hurled at Moab. And once it stands as a plain noun, "woe" itself, in the question "Who has woe? Who has sorrow?"

One startling thing happens twice in Hosea: God himself speaks this human cry over his own people, saying "woe to them." The shock is that the God who would normally pronounce sentence instead makes the sound of a grieving sufferer, as if mourning a loss he cannot bear.

The word has a near-twin, הוֹי ("hoy"), which English also renders "woe." Most scholars today keep the two apart: this word is the spontaneous cry of personal pain, while its twin is a more formal, stylized call that the prophets used to announce judgment, borrowed from the wail of a funeral. A related Hebrew cry of grief is אַלְלַי ("alelay"), and in the Greek New Testament the matching cry is οὐαί ("ouai").