Goliath


Goliath is a Philistine warrior of giant stature who plays a pivotal role in the origin myth of King David in the Book of Samuel. According to 1 Samuel, Goliath challenges the Israelites to best him in single combat. David, then a young shepherd, takes up the challenge and kills Goliath with a stone slung from a sling. The narrative signifies King Saul's unfitness to rule for not taking up the giant's challenge himself.
The phrase "David and Goliath" has taken on a more popular meaning denoting an underdog situation, a contest wherein a smaller, weaker opponent faces a much bigger, stronger adversary. Some modern scholars now believe that the original slayer of Goliath in the text may have been Elhanan, son of Jair, who features in 2 Samuel 21:19, in which Elhanan kills Goliath the Gittite, and that the authors of the Deuteronomistic history changed the original text to credit the victory to the more famous figure of David.

Biblical accounts

In 1 Samuel 17, Saul and the Israelites are facing the Philistines in the Valley of Elah. Twice a day for 40 days, morning and evening, Goliath, the champion of the Philistines, comes out between the lines and challenges the Israelites to send out a champion of their own to decide the outcome in single combat, but Saul is afraid. David accepts the challenge. Saul reluctantly agrees and offers his armour, which David declines, taking only his staff, sling, and five stones from a brook.
David and Goliath confront each other, Goliath with his armor and javelin, David with his staff and sling. "The Philistine cursed David by his gods", but David replies:
David hurls a stone from his sling and hits Goliath in the center of his forehead, Goliath falls on his face to the ground, and David cuts off his head. The Philistines flee and are pursued by the Israelites "as far as Gath and the gates of Ekron". David puts the armor of Goliath in his own tent and takes the head to Jerusalem, and Saul sends Abner to bring the boy to him. The king asks whose son he is, and David answers:

Composition of the Book of Samuel

The Books of Samuel, together with the books of Joshua, Judges and Kings, make up a unified history of Israel which biblical scholars call the Deuteronomistic History. The first edition of the history was probably written at the court of Judah's King Josiah and a revised second edition during the exile, with further revisions in the post-exilic period. Traces of this can be seen in contradictions within the Goliath story, such as that between 1 Samuel 17:54, which says that David took Goliath's head to Jerusalem, although according to 2 Samuel 5 Jerusalem at that time was still a Jebusite stronghold and was not captured until David became king.

Structure of the David and Goliath narrative

The Goliath story is made up of base-narrative with numerous additions made probably after the exile:
  • The Israelites and Philistines face each other; Goliath makes his challenge to single combat;
  • David volunteers to fight Goliath;
  • David selects five smooth stones from a creek-bed to be used in his sling;
  • David's courage strengthens others and eventually others defeat four other giants, possibly brothers, but relatives, reference 2 Samuel 21:15–22.
  • David defeats Goliath, the Philistines flee the battlefield.
  • David is sent by his father to bring food to his brothers, hears the challenge, and expresses his desire to accept;
  • Details of the account of the battle;
  • Saul asks who David is, and he is introduced to the king through Abner.

    Textual considerations

Goliath's height

The oldest manuscripts, namely the Dead Sea Scrolls text of Samuel from the late 1st century BCE, the 1st-century CE historian Josephus, and the major Septuagint manuscripts, all give Goliath's height as "four cubits and a span", whereas the Masoretic Text has "six cubits and a span". Many scholars have suggested that the smaller number grew in the course of transmission, possibly when a scribe's eye was drawn to the number six in line 17:7.

Goliath and Saul

The underlying purpose of the story of Goliath is to show that Saul is not fit to be king. Saul was chosen to lead the Israelites against their enemies, but when faced with Goliath, he refuses to do so; Saul is a head taller than anyone else in all Israel, which implies he was over tall and the obvious challenger for Goliath, yet David is the one who eventually defeated him. Also, Saul's armour and weaponry are apparently no better than Goliath's:
David's speech in 1 Samuel 17 can be interpreted as referring to both Saul and Goliath through its animal imagery. When this imagery is considered closely, David can be seen to function as the true king who manipulates wild beasts.

Elhanan and Goliath

In 2 Samuel 21, verse 19, the Hebrew Bible tells how Goliath was killed by "Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite". The fourth-century BC 1 Chronicle 20:5 explains the second Goliath by saying that Elhanan "slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath", which is thought by biblical source critics to have constructed the name Lahmi from the last portion of the word "Bethlehemite", and the King James Bible adopted this identification into 2 Samuel 21:18–19. Regardless, the Hebrew text at Goliath's name in 2 Samuel 21 makes no mention of the word "brother". Most scholars dismiss the later 1 Chronicles 20:5 material as "an obvious harmonization".

Goliath and the Greeks

The armor described in 1 Samuel 17 appears typical of Greek armor of the sixth century BCE; narrative formulae such as the settlement of battle by single combat between champions has been thought characteristic of the Homeric epics rather than of the ancient Near East. The designation of Goliath as a איש הביניים, "man of the in-between" appears to be a borrowing from Greek "man of the ", i.e., the space between two opposite army camps where champion combat would take place. Other scholars argue the description is a trustworthy reflection of the armaments that a Philistine warrior would have worn in the tenth century BCE.
A story very similar to that of David and Goliath appears in the Iliad, written –710 BCE, where Nestor in order to encourage the Greeks to meet a challenge to single combat by Hector recalls when, as a young man, he fought and conquered the giant Ereuthalion. Each giant wields a distinctive weapon—an iron club in Ereuthalion's case, a massive bronze spear in Goliath's; each giant, clad in armor, comes out of the enemy's massed array to challenge all the warriors in the opposing army; in each case the seasoned warriors are afraid, and the challenge is taken up by a stripling, the youngest in his family In each case an older and more experienced father figure tells the boy that he is too young and inexperienced, but in each case the young hero receives divine aid and the giant is left sprawling on the ground. Nestor, fighting on foot, then takes the chariot of his enemy, while David, on foot, takes the sword of Goliath. The enemy army then flees, the victors pursue and slaughter them and return with their bodies, and the boy-hero is acclaimed by the people. However, some scholars question whether the biblical writers would have ever had access to the Iliad, and argue that the similarities between both tales are also present in other ancient Near Eastern accounts of duels.

Goliath's name

, the biblical Gath and traditional home of Goliath, has been the subject of extensive excavations by Israel's Bar-Ilan University. The archaeologists have established that this was one of the largest of the Philistine cities until it was destroyed in the ninth century BC, an event from which it never recovered. The Tell es-Safi inscription, a potsherd discovered at the site, and reliably dated to between the tenth to mid-ninth centuries BC, is inscribed with the two names ʾLWT and WLT. While the names are not directly connected with the biblical Goliath, they are etymologically related and demonstrate that the name fits with the context of the late tenth- to early ninth-century BC Philistine culture. The name "Goliath" itself is non-Semitic and has been linked with the Lydian king Alyattes, which also fits the Philistine context of the biblical Goliath story. A similar name, Uliat, is also attested in Carian inscriptions. Aren Maeir, director of the excavation, comments: "Here we have very nice evidence the name Goliath appearing in the Bible in the context of the story of David and Goliath... is not some later literary creation."
Based on the southwest Anatolian onomastic considerations, Roger D. Woodard proposed *Walwatta as a reconstruction of the form ancestral to both Hebrew Goliath and Lydian Alyattes. In this case, the original meaning of Goliath's name would be "Lion-man," thus placing him within the realm of Indo-European warrior-beast mythology.
The Babylonian Talmud explains the name "Goliath, son of Gath" through a reference to his mother's promiscuity, based on the Aramaic גַּת, as everyone threshed his mother as people do to grapes in a winepress.
The name sometimes appears in English as Goliah.

Later traditions

Judaism

According to the Babylonian Talmud, Goliath was a son of Orpah, the sister-in-law of Ruth, David's own great-grandmother. Ruth Rabbah, a haggadic and homiletic interpretation of the Book of Ruth, makes the blood relationship even closer, considering Orpah and Ruth to have been full sisters. Orpah was said to have made a pretense of accompanying Ruth but after forty paces left her. Thereafter she led a dissolute life. According to the Jerusalem Talmud, Goliath was born by polyspermy, and had about one hundred fathers.
The Talmud stresses Goliath's ungodliness: his taunts before the Israelites included the boast that it was he who had captured the Ark of the Covenant and brought it to the temple of Dagon, and his challenges to combat were made at morning and evening to disturb the Israelites in their prayers. His armor weighed 60 tons, according to rabbi Hanina; 120, according to rabbi Abba bar Kahana; and his sword, which became the sword of David, had marvelous powers. On his death it was found that his heart carried the image of Dagon, who thereby also came to a shameful downfall.
In Pseudo-Philo, believed to have been composed between 135 BCE and 70 CE, David picks up seven stones and writes on them his father's name, his own name, and the name of God, one name per stone; then, speaking to Goliath, he says: After David strikes Goliath with the stone he runs to Goliath before he dies, and Goliath says: "Hurry and kill me and rejoice." David replies: "Before you die, open your eyes and see your slayer." Goliath sees an angel and tells David that it is not he who has killed him but the angel. Pseudo-Philo then goes on to say that the angel of the Lord changes David's appearance so that no one recognizes him, and thus Saul asks who he is.
A late Second Temple-era Jewish family tomb located near Jericho, dating from the 1st century CE, was found with multiple ossuaries inscribed with the name "Goliath" attached to the deceased; examples include "Yeho'ezer son of El'azar Goliath," "Salome wife of Yeho'ezer Goliath," and "Shelamzion mother of Yo'ezer Goliath." According to epigraphists, this was not a family name but a nickname originally given to one family member because of his unusual height, which later stuck to his descendants, either out of respect for the ancestor or because they too were physically large.