Woe Is Me: A Note On One Small Word

I’ve been reading R.C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God, and the second chapter kept me up last night in the best sense. He walks through Isaiah’s vision in the temple, the seraphim crying holy, holy, holy, and then he slows down over Isaiah’s response. “Woe is me! For I am lost” (Isaiah 6:5). Sproul makes the point that “woe” isn’t a sigh. It’s a pronouncement, the language prophets used for judgment, and here a prophet turns it on himself.

I’ve known that verse since I was a teenager. I don’t think I’d ever looked at the word itself though. So I went digging, and this is what I found.

Not surprisingly, english has definitely worn the word out.

“Woe is me” survives mostly as a joke now, the thing you say with the back of your hand to your forehead when the coffee shop is out of oat milk. In the King James era it still carried weight, but it was already archaic, and centuries of melodrama have hollowed it further. Which is a shame, because behind it stand two Hebrew words and one Greek word that are anything but “light.”

Hebrew has two cries… that are distinctly different.

1. The first is ‘oy. It’s the cry of someone in personal distress, usually followed by the reason. “Woe to us, for we are ruined!” (Jeremiah 4:13). “Woe is me, my mother, that you bore me” (Jeremiah 15:10). “Woe to us, for we have sinned!” (Lamentations 5:16). It’s the sound of a person who has just grasped how bad things are, and it’s the word Isaiah uses in the temple: ‘oy-li, woe to me.
2. The second is hoy, and this is the one that surprised me. Its earliest home seems to have been the funeral. When the old prophet of Bethel buries the man of God he’d deceived, he mourns over him with “Alas, my brother!” (1 Kings 13:30), and the Hebrew is hoy ‘achi. Jeremiah says of King Jehoiakim that no one will lament him by crying “Ah, my brother!” or “Ah, sister!” (22:18), the same hoy. It was the wail you raised over a body.

Then the prophets took that funeral cry and aimed it at the living. “Woe to those who join house to house” (Isaiah 5:8). “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil” (5:20). “Woe to you who desire the day of the LORD” (Amos 5:18). Habakkuk strings five of them together against Babylon. Waldemar Janzen, who wrote a whole study on these oracles, argued that their roots lie in exactly that mourning cry, and I find the case persuasive.

Which means a prophetic woe is something like a eulogy delivered to people who are still walking around. The prophet is saying, in effect: I am already grieving you. Unless something changes, you are as good as dead.

That makes Isaiah 6 even more startling than I’d realized.

Read the chapter before it. In Isaiah 5 the prophet pronounces six woes on Judah, one after another: on the greedy, the drunk, the cynical, those who twist good and evil, the self-wise, the corrupt judges (5:8, 11, 18, 20, 21, 22). Six times he lifts the funeral cry over his own people.

Then he goes into the temple, sees the Lord high and lifted up, and the 7th woe comes out of his own mouth, about himself.

Seven, in the Hebrew imagination, is the number of completeness. I don’t think it’s an accident that the series isn’t finished until the man pronouncing it is included in it.

Sproul draws the point that in the presence of God’s holiness, Isaiah finally saw himself as he was. I’d only add that he saw himself standing in the same line as everyone he’d been preaching against.

The word translated “lost” deepens it further.

Isaiah’s full sentence is ‘oy-li ki-nidmeti. The King James renders that last word “I am undone,” the ESV “I am lost,” the NIV “I am ruined.” The verb comes from a root that can carry the sense of being cut off, destroyed, or brought to silence. I find that last shade almost painfully apt, because of what he says next: “for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips” (6:5).

His problem was his mouth. The prophet whose whole vocation was speech, who had just pronounced six eloquent woes, stands before the holy God and is struck silent by the uncleanness of the very instrument he’d been using.

And “unclean” is a leper’s word.

Leviticus tells the leper to tear his clothes, cover his upper lip, and cry out, “Unclean, unclean” (Leviticus 13:45). Covering the lip. Crying tame’.

Now remember how the chapter opens: “In the year that King Uzziah died” (Isaiah 6:1). Uzziah had been a strong king, but at the height of his power he walked into the temple to burn incense on the altar, a duty reserved for the priests. The priests confronted him, he raged at them, and leprosy broke out on his forehead right there beside the altar. He lived out his remaining years as a leper, cut off from the house of the LORD (2 Chronicles 26:16-21).

So in the year the leper-king died, Isaiah stands in the same temple and cries out like a leper, confessing the uncleanness of his lips. And then a seraph flies to him with a burning coal taken from the altar, touches it to his mouth, and says, “your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for” (6:7).

The same altar. Uzziah approached it in presumption and left it unclean. Isaiah approached it in confession and left it clean.

The Greek word keeps the grief.

In the New Testament the word is ouai, which is about as close as Greek gets to an onomatopoeia for wailing. When Jesus pronounces woes, they’re often read as pure denunciation, and they are severe. Luke sets four woes directly beside four blessings (Luke 6:20-26), so that “woe to you who are rich” mirrors “blessed are you who are poor.” Matthew records seven woes against the scribes and Pharisees in a single chapter (Matthew 23).

But listen to how Matthew 23 ends. After the seventh woe, Jesus doesn’t conclude with a sentence of doom. He weeps. “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets… How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (23:37).

The woes and the lament are one breath. That’s the funeral cry exactly. Jesus wasn’t cursing people He’d stopped caring about. He was mourning people He loved, over a death they were choosing.

I think that changes how I ought to hear every “woe” in the Bible. It’s never merely the sound of a door slamming. It’s the sound of someone grieving on the other side of said door.

There’s even a repeated woe.

In Revelation, the four living creatures around the throne cry “Holy, holy, holy” day and night (Revelation 4:8), echoing Isaiah’s seraphim. A few chapters later an eagle flies through midheaven crying with a loud voice, “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth” (8:13).

3 holies and 3 woes. I don’t want to create some kind of new meaning on the symmetry, but I notice it. Wherever God’s holiness is declared in its fullness, the honest response of creatures who are not holy is woe. Isaiah simply said it first, and said it about himself.

The mature believer’s woe doesn’t end in the dust.

This is where I think the passage speaks most directly to anyone who has walked with God a long time. Isaiah was already a prophet when this happened. He’d been preaching for some time. The woe wasn’t his conversion. It was a deeper seeing, the kind that comes not at the start of a walk with God but somewhere in the middle of it, when you discover that the uncleanness you’ve been pointing out in everyone else lives in your own mouth too.

And it doesn’t leave him there.

Immediately after the coal, God asks, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” and the man who a moment ago was silenced answers, “Here I am! Send me” (6:8). The undone man is the sent man. The lips that were unclean are the lips God commissions.

Paul carried the same shape centuries later. “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16). For him the woe had become a kind of necessity laid on him, the grief of a man who knew what he’d been rescued from and couldn’t bear to keep it to himself.

I think that’s the woe God wants from His people.

Not some kind of dramatic sigh, and not a self-hatred that wallows in self-pity. A clear but grieving sight of ourselves in the light of His holiness, followed by a coal, followed by a “sending.”

I’d like to say it more often, and mean it more. Woe is me. And then, when the coal has done its work, here I am.