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 (only a few have suggested the reverse, that an original larger number was reduced), 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 (but that David is). 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 (1 Samuel 9:2), 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" ("''beit-ha'lahmi''"), 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 (the
Iliad) rather than of the ancient Near East. The designation of Goliath as a , "man of the in-between" (a longstanding difficulty in translating 1 Samuel 17) 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 (Nestor is the twelfth son of
Neleus, David the seventh or eighth son of
Jesse.) In each case an older and more experienced father figure (Nestor's own father, David's patron Saul) 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 Tell es-Safi, 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 (,
GLYT), 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 [that] 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. ==Later traditions==