Arrow

An arrow is a slender shaft tipped with a point and shot from a bow, and in Scripture it functions both as a literal weapon of war and hunting and as one of the Bible's most persistent images for sudden, penetrating harm.

The text says plainly that arrows are instruments of killing: the oracle in Numbers 24:8 has Israel piercing hostile nations with its arrows, and Deuteronomy 32:42 pictures Yahweh's own arrows "drunk with blood" alongside a devouring sword. Historically, archers were a standard component of ancient Near Eastern armies, and the Hebrew noun chets (arrow) is the ordinary word for the projectile throughout the Old Testament; arrows in this literature were typically reed or wood shafts with bronze or iron heads, sometimes fitted with burning material, which is likely the background to the "flaming arrows" of Psalm 7:13 and the "coals of juniper" of Psalm 120:4 (juniper charcoal burns long and hot). Psalm 45:5 and Habakkuk 3:11 both use arrows as the emblem of a king's or God's decisive victory, the latter in a scene of cosmic upheaval where sun and moon halt at the light of flying shafts.

Beyond warfare, arrows carry two further senses. The text uses them for affliction sent by God: Job 6:4 speaks of "the arrows of the Almighty" within him whose poison his spirit drinks, and Psalm 38:2 of arrows that have pierced the psalmist, both images of suffering experienced as aimed and intentional rather than random. Arrows also stand for words. Psalm 57:4 describes men "whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword," and Psalm 120:4 answers deceitful speech with "sharp arrows of the mighty" — the tongue's wounding matched by a warrior's weapon. Against this, Psalm 91:5 lists "the arrow that flies by day" among the terrors the sheltered person need not fear, pairing it with "the terror by night" as a comprehensive picture of danger.

Traditions differ in how literally they press these images. In Jewish reading, the pairing of night terror and daytime arrow in Psalm 91:5 has often been taken as protection from unseen harm, including demonic danger, while Christian readers have commonly read the same verse as a general promise of divine safekeeping and, by extension, deliverance from temptation. The "flaming arrows" of Psalm 7:13 are read by some Christians as a picture of the devil's assaults, an association drawn from later New Testament imagery rather than from the psalm itself, while others keep the verse within its context of God's judgment on the violent. The arrows of Job 6:4 and Psalm 38:2 are variously heard as descriptions of bodily sickness, of accusation of conscience, or of grief, and interpreters disagree about whether the poison language is literal (poisoned arrowheads) or figurative.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.