Lesson 6: Relative Pronouns & More
Woe to you!
Before we move on, we need to address a strange grammatical construct that is not uncommon in Scripture.
Woe to you...
How do we grammatically understand this phrase? “Woe” is a noun, “to” is a preposition, and “you” is the object of the preposition. So how is it that there is no verb and yet this declaration can stand by itself as a whole sentence? What is going on?
There are a couple of different ways that you could understand and then diagram this sort of sentence, the most helpful being to assume an implied linking verb: “Woe be to you.” This gives us the situation we have seen before where a linking verb is followed by a prepositional predicate adjective.
