Goliath

Almost every detail of the Goliath story exists in more than one version, and the differences are visible in the surviving manuscripts rather than inferred.

On who killed him, the second book of Samuel states plainly that Elhanan of Bethlehem killed Goliath the Gittite, whose spear shaft was like a weaver's beam. Chronicles, retelling the same list, has Elhanan kill the brother of Goliath, which reads as a harmonisation. Commentators from antiquity onward have proposed that Elhanan was another name for David, or that the Chronicler preserves the original.

On his height, the Masoretic Hebrew gives six cubits and a span, close to nine feet nine inches. The Greek Septuagint, the historian Josephus, and a Samuel scroll recovered from Qumran all give four cubits and a span, close to six feet nine. Three independent early witnesses agree against the received Hebrew, which makes the shorter figure the better attested reading and turns Goliath from an impossible giant into a very large man.

The chapter as a whole also circulated in two lengths. The Greek text of Vaticanus lacks a substantial block of verses that the Hebrew has, and the Hebrew version consequently introduces David twice, once as Saul's harpist and armour bearer and again as an unknown shepherd boy whose name Saul has to ask for.

None of this is a modern discovery, and none of it is marginal. The best known single combat in the Hebrew Bible is preserved in a form that shows two accounts being fitted together, and the seams were left where they are.

The description of the champion's equipment is unusually detailed for the Hebrew Bible: a bronze helmet, a coat of scale armour, bronze greaves, a bronze javelin between his shoulders, a spear with a shaft like a weaver's beam and an iron head, and a shield bearer walking ahead of him. Greaves in particular are not Israelite kit, and the assemblage as described resembles the heavy infantry equipment of the Aegean world more than that of the Judean hills, which fits what is otherwise known about Philistine material culture and its Aegean connections.

The combat itself follows a recognised convention in which two armies avoid a general engagement by putting forward single champions and abiding by the result. The narrative makes David break the convention rather than win within it: he refuses the armour Saul offers, comes with a staff and a sling, and kills at range before contact.

Goliath is called a Gittite, a man of Gath, which is identified with the large mound of Tell es-Safi in the Judean foothills and has been excavated for decades. In 2005 a sherd was published from that site bearing two personal names of a non Semitic type whose form is close to the name Goliath. It does not identify any individual and nobody involved claimed that it did. What it establishes is narrower and still useful: names of that shape were in use at Gath in roughly the right period, so the name in the story belongs to the place the story assigns it to.