2 · 1 Samuel 17
A champion from Gath, a shepherd with a sling, and a question the Bible itself raises: who killed Goliath?
“…I come to you in the name of the LORD of Heaven’s Armies…”
The Philistines came up from the coastal plain and camped between Socoh and Azekah, in the Shephelah, the low hills between the coast and the highlands of Judah. Saul’s army faced them across the valley of Elah, the valley of the terebinth tree. For forty days, morning and evening, a champion from Gath walked out between the lines and dared Israel to send one man to fight him, the loser’s people to serve the winner’s (17:8–10, 16).
The chapter describes his armor piece by piece: a bronze helmet, a coat of mail weighing about 125 pounds, bronze leg guards, a bronze javelin, and a spear with a shaft like a weaver’s beam and an iron point of about 15 pounds (17:5–7). The Hebrew makes him six cubits and a span tall, over nine feet. The oldest Greek copies make him four cubits and a span, about six foot nine.
David, the youngest of Jesse’s sons, was at home with the sheep. His father sent him to the camp with roasted grain and bread for his three oldest brothers and cheeses for their commander (17:13–18). He heard the challenge, and the reward Saul had promised the man who took it up, and offered to go himself. Saul dressed him in his own armor; David took it off again. He went down with his staff, his sling and five smooth stones from the stream (17:38–40).
One stone struck the Philistine in the forehead, and he fell face down. David took the giant’s own sword, killed him and cut off his head (17:49–51), and Israel chased the Philistines back toward Gath and Ekron. Then, the chapter says, David took the head to Jerusalem (17:54), a city the Jebusites still held and he wouldn’t capture for years (2 Samuel 5:6–9). Some read the line as a note added later; others point out that Israelites already lived in the city alongside the Jebusites (Judges 1:21).
As David went out to fight, Saul turned to his commander, Abner, and asked whose son the young man was (17:55). Yet one chapter earlier David had already joined Saul’s court as his harp player and armor-bearer, and Saul had sent to Jesse asking to keep him (16:21–22). The two first meetings sit side by side in the text. They are the first of several places where the Bible tells this story more than one way.
Five texts
The Bible answers more than one way, and so do its oldest copies and its translations.
Each card is one text’s version, with how scholars read it. None of them settles the question alone.
“So David triumphed over the Philistine with only a sling and a stone…”
David kills him. In this chapter of the Hebrew the giant is named only twice, at 17:4 and 17:23; everywhere else in it he is simply “the Philistine.” Many critical scholars think the name came in later from Elhanan’s story, and Steven McKenzie reads David’s fight as a reworking of Elhanan’s.
1 Samuel 17:50, NLT. The Masoretic Text, the standard Hebrew.
“…four cubits and a span…”
The oldest nearly complete Greek Bible tells a shorter story, about 40 percent shorter. There’s no errand with food for the brothers (17:12–31), no question from Saul about whose son David is (17:55–58), and no friendship pact with Jonathan (18:1–5). Some scholars think it preserves an older, shorter Hebrew story; others that a translator or scribe cut it to smooth out the contradictions.
The Septuagint in Codex Vaticanus, 300s AD. The same height is in a Dead Sea Scroll of Samuel and in Josephus.
“Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim the Bethlehemite struck down Goliath the Gittite…”
In a list of fights with the giants of Gath, Elhanan kills Goliath, whose spear shaft is like a weaver’s beam, the same detail as 1 Samuel 17:7. The NLT and NIV print “the brother of Goliath,” and say in their footnotes that the Hebrew doesn’t have it. The ESV keeps the Hebrew.
2 Samuel 21:19, translated word for word from the Hebrew. Footnotes in the NLT and NIV.
“Elhanan son of Jair struck down Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite…”
Chronicles, written centuries later, retells three of the four fights, leaving out the one where David nearly dies. In Hebrew, “the Bethlehemite … Goliath” (bêt hallaḥmî ʾet golyat) and “Lahmi the brother of Goliath” (ʾet laḥmî ʾăḥî golyat) differ by a few letters. Many scholars think the Chronicler, or a scribe before him, read one as the other and so reconciled the two stories. Others think Chronicles kept the original wording and the copy of Samuel was damaged.
1 Chronicles 20:5, translated word for word from the Hebrew.
“…Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim, a Beth-lehemite, slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam.”
The King James translators followed Chronicles. They added “the brother of” to 2 Samuel 21:19 and set it in a different type, their sign for words not in the Hebrew; later printings show such words in italics. The Geneva Bible, half a century earlier, had kept “slew Goliath the Gittite.” English Bibles still divide the same way, so the answer you read depends on the translation you open.
2 Samuel 21:19 in the King James Version, the added words marked here; and the Geneva Bible (1560).
The LORD’s battle
Whoever struck the blow, 1 Samuel 17 says what its story is for. Before the stone flies, David tells the Philistine that everyone watching will learn the LORD rescues his people “not with sword and spear. This is the LORD’s battle” (17:47, NLT). The books that tell it kept their different versions side by side, and left the reader to weigh them.
For a closer look
How tall he was, why Saul meets David twice, what the digs at Gath and above the valley have found, and the other giants of Gath.
A cubit was the length of a forearm, about 18 inches (45 cm), and a span was half that. Six cubits and a span, the Hebrew’s figure, comes to about 9 feet 9 inches, close to three meters. Four cubits and a span comes to about 6 feet 9 inches. That smaller figure is in the Greek Codex Vaticanus, in a Dead Sea Scroll of Samuel, 4QSamᵃ, copied in the first century BC, and in Josephus (Antiquities 6.171).
The NLT puts the Hebrew figure in its text and the smaller one in a footnote. J. Daniel Hays has argued that four cubits is the original and the larger number grew in copying; Clyde Billington has defended the Hebrew’s six cubits, but with a shorter cubit that makes Goliath about eight and a half feet. Either way, the story sets the giant against Saul, the tallest man in Israel (9:2), who was as terrified as the rest of his army (17:11).
In chapter 16, David comes to Saul’s court as a harp player to soothe him, and becomes his armor-bearer (16:14–23). In chapter 17 he arrives as an unknown shepherd, and as he goes out to fight, Saul asks Abner whose son he is; after the fight he asks David himself (17:55–58).
Many scholars, following Emanuel Tov, see two versions of David’s rise woven together, one of them the shorter story the Greek preserves. Others read the chapters as one design: Saul, who had promised the victor’s family freedom from taxes (17:25), wants to know the father’s name, not the boy’s. 1 · The youngest son will take this up.
Gath was one of the five chief cities of the Philistines. Its ruins are at Tell es-Safi, at the western end of the valley, where the hills give way to the coastal plain. Aren Maeir of Bar-Ilan University led excavations there from 1996 to 2021.
In 2005 his team found a potsherd scratched with two names in an early alphabet, read as ʾalwt and wlt, from the tenth or ninth century BC. Neither name is Goliath, but both are non-Semitic names of the same kind, and Maeir argued that they show the story reflects the culture of Gath in roughly that era. The city was destroyed around 830 BC, most likely by Hazael of Damascus (2 Kings 12:17).
On a ridge on the north side of the valley, opposite Socoh, stand the walls of Khirbet Qeiyafa, a small fortified town excavated by Yosef Garfinkel and Saar Ganor from 2007 to 2013. The excavators found two gates, and radiocarbon dates from burnt olive pits put it around 1000 BC.
Garfinkel identifies it with Shaaraim, “two gates,” on the road the fleeing Philistines took (17:52), and reads it as a fort of David’s kingdom. Others disagree. Israel Finkelstein and Alexander Fantalkin think it more likely belonged to an early northern Israelite polity; still others have called it Canaanite. The site can’t confirm the fight, but it shows that someone fortified this valley at about the time the story is set.
2 Samuel 21:15–22 lists four warriors of Gath, descended from the giants, killed by David’s men. In the first fight David, worn out, is nearly killed until Abishai saves him, and his men make him promise not to go into battle again. Elhanan’s fight is the third. A warrior named Elhanan son of Dodo, from Bethlehem, is also among David’s Thirty (23:24); whether he is the same man is unknown.
Some have tried to make Elhanan and David one man. The Aramaic Targum renders Elhanan as David, and in 1948 A. M. Honeyman proposed that Elhanan was David’s given name and “David” a throne name.