This fragment is often compared with fragments that seem to assert contradictions in the physical world, like B60 and B61.  Kahn tries to draw out of the bow two different works: death and life: in one sense, the bow brings death to the food I hunt and thus it brings life to me.  Barnes correctly rejects this reading.  Heraclitus assigns one work to the bow: death.  The contradiction lies between the name and the work, not between two different works.  Barnes sees in this nothing more than a pun and dismisses it, but his reading is too simple.

    Heraclitus is very interested in language.  The divine principle is called the lógos ('word', 'account', 'spoken thing').  Though the lógos is the same for all men (B1), they do not understand it because they have barbarian souls (i.e., souls that do not understand the language of the lógos, B107).  In this fragment, language itself is teaching us something about the nature of the universe: death and life co-exist in an object.  Kahn supposed that Heraclitus meant that the bow brought both death and life, but this is not Heraclitus' point: on the one hand, it brings death; on the other hand, it is called life.  By giving us the word 'life' for something that works 'death,' the lógos is telling us that individual things contain both opposites in a pair.