Jeremiah 9:3 - Exposition

And they bend their tongues , etc.; rather, and they bend their tongue as their bow of falsehood , and they use not their valor in (literally, according to ) good faith . There is a sad, stern irony in these words, which remind us of Isaiah's ( Isaiah 5:22 ) "valiant men—for drinking wine" and of our own prophet's repetition of himself in Jeremiah 22:10 , "Their valor is—untruth." A less pointed form of the same figurative statement is that of the psalmist in Psalms 64:3 . Upon the earth ; rather, in the land . The Authorized Version pays very little regard to the context in its rendering of the ambiguous word erec .