Charles Ellicott Commentary Psalms 78:9

"The children of Ephraim, being armed and carrying bows, Turned back in the day of battle." — Psalms 78:9 (ASV)

Armed, and carrying bows. —Following Jeremiah 4:29, and by analogy with Jeremiah 44:9 (handle and bend the bow), a literal rendering of the Hebrew text here is drawing and shooting with the bow.

The Septuagint and Vulgate render it as “bending and shooting with the bow.” However, a close comparison of this verse with Psalms 78:57 of this psalm, and with Hosea 7:16, has suggested to a recent commentator a much more satisfactory explanation: The sons of Ephraim (are like men) drawing slack bowstrings which turn back in the day of battle.

As Burgess notes in his Notes on the Hebrew Psalms, “Both the disappointment on the day of battle and the cause of the disappointment, which are mentioned in the text, will be appreciated by the English reader who remembers that the result of the battle of Creçy was determined at the outset by a shower of rain which relaxed the strings of our enemy’s bows.”

This translation assumes that the original meaning of the verb râmah is was slack. Certainly, the root idea of the word (compare the cognate râphah and the meaning of its derivation in Proverbs 10:4 and Proverbs 12:24) seems to have been relaxation. That turned back, both here and in Psalms 78:57, refers to the recoil of a bow, seems indubitable.

By understanding this as a comparison of Ephraim’s general character to a bow with a relaxed string that fails when needed—a figure made more expressive because archery was a practice in which Ephraim excelled—we are freed from needing to conjecture a particular incident to account for this verse, which might otherwise seem to break the sequence of thought.

The entire historical review is intended to lead up to the rejection of the northern kingdom (represented by Ephraim). However, the poet is unable to hold back his climax and inserts it here almost parenthetically.