Bow

A bow is a curved weapon that stores tension in a bent stave to drive an arrow, and the same Hebrew word, qeshet, also names the rainbow, so the term carries both a weapon of war and a sign in the sky. In Genesis 49:24 the dying blessing on Joseph speaks of a bow that "remained strong," with the arms of his hands made strong by "the hands of the Mighty One of Jacob," where the bow stands for martial strength and, by extension, the tribe's enduring vigour. The psalms take up the weapon as a picture of God-given skill: "He teaches my hands to war, so that my arms bend a bow of bronze" (2 Samuel 22:35; Psalms 18:34), language that treats archery as a craft learned from God himself. Ezekiel 39:9 lists "the bows and the arrows" among the shields, war clubs and spears that the returning exiles burn for seven years, an image of total and lasting disarmament after judgment.

Scripture also uses the bow as a measure of a person's or a nation's reliability. Psalms 78:57 describes the faithless generation as "twisted like a deceitful bow" — a weapon that warps and misses when it is needed, so that the metaphor turns on failure rather than on strength. In the opposite direction, the bow is an instrument of judgment in God's hand: "He has bent his bow like an enemy" (Lamentations 2:4), and Job, surrounded by archers, cries that God's arrows have him surrounded (Job 16:13). Isaiah 13:18 describes the bows of the Medes dashing young men in pieces without pity, and Revelation 6:2 presents a rider on a white horse who "had a bow," receiving a crown and going out "conquering, and to conquer." What the text says, in each case, is that the bow belongs to the vocabulary of siege, warfare and divine assault.

The rainbow sense belongs to the same word. Ezekiel 1:28 compares the brightness surrounding the likeness of Yahweh's glory to "the appearance of the rainbow that is in the cloud in the day of rain," and Revelation 4:3 and 10:1 place a rainbow around the throne and on the head of the mighty angel. Linguistically, the Hebrew qeshet is the ordinary word for both weapon and rainbow; the Greek of Revelation, by contrast, uses toxon for the weapon at 6:2 and a different word for the rainbow, so the double meaning is a feature of the Hebrew that the Greek does not reproduce. Many readers of Ezekiel and Revelation have therefore taken the rainbow imagery as deliberately recalling the covenant sign of the bow in the cloud first given to Noah.

Christian traditions read the imagery differently. The rainbow around the throne is treated by many as a sign that judgment is encircled by covenant mercy, while others stress the bow's plain function as an instrument of wrath, especially where God is said to bend it like an enemy. The rider of Revelation 6:2 is identified by some as Christ going out to conquer and by others as a false conqueror or a figure of war and pestilence, a disagreement that turns in part on whether the bow is read as the rider's own weapon or as a borrowed emblem. None of these readings is the plainly stated sense of the text; they are interpretive judgments, and the entry notes them as such.

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.