woe

The antithesis of ‘blessed’ or ‘happy’, as in Luke 6:24 ff. where Jesus laments the unhappy condition before God of those who are rich, complacent, and self-satisfied, compared with the poor and the persecuted (Luke 6:20–3) who are blessed. Two Jewish towns, Chorazin and Bethsaida, are condemned as miserable and doomed (Matt. 11:21) and contrasted with the potential for repentance in the Gentile cities Tyre and Sidon. Three woes (disasters) are predicted for the inhabitants of the earth (Rev. 8:13); this is a theme frequently met in Jewish writings of this period, that there will be a time of bitter suffering, the ‘Messianic woes’, sometimes expressed as birth-pangs, preceding the dawn of salvation, a belief expressed by Paul in terms of the cross (2 Cor. 5:14).