Know Your Bible: David and Goliath

Whether it is a sports team playing an opponent ranked dramatically ahead of them, or a single citizen going against the power of a multi-national corporation, we use the phrase "David and Goliath" to describe any overwhelmingly unbalanced confrontation.

In this post, I will outline the key things one should know about the original "David and Goliath" story, including the fact that, in retrospect, it wasn't a miracle and no one should have been surprised by the outcome.


The Original Story

In Chapter 17 of 1st Samuel (ca. 1000 BCE), Saul, King of Israel, is facing a challenge from the Philistine army. The Philistines are a possible Greek-speaking people who had settled on the Mediterranean shore in the region roughly equivalent to modern day Gaza. 

A champion from among the Philistine ranks, Goliath of Gath, offered the challenge that if anyone could beat him, the Philistines would become vassals of Israel, but if he won, Israel would surrender to them (1 Sam 17:9). No Israelite felt up to this challenge.


How Tall was Goliath?

This is hard to determine. The Hebrew text (1 Sam 17:4) states that he was "six cubits and a span tall" (גבהו שש אמות וזרת).

A cubit was about 1.5 feet, a span roughly nine inches. That would make him more than nine feet tall. The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, says he was four (τεσσαρων) cubits and span. A fragment of the Hebrew text from Qumran also has the number four, meaning Goliath was likely a more reasonable 6 and a half feet tall, still really tall for that age, when people were generally shorter.


The Fight is On

When the boy David arrived on the scene, he told King Saul that he would accept the challenge (1 Sam 17:32). 

David went against Goliath with nothing but five smooth stones gathered from a nearby wadi and a sling (1 Sam 17:40). As the opponents drew close to fight, David hurled a stone with his sling, embedding it in the forehead of the giant, who fell dead to the ground. David drew out the Philistine's own sword and cut off Goliath's head (1 Sam 49-51).


Goliath Never Stood a Chance

While some modern readers may see David's victory as "miraculous," original hearers of the story had a different experience. They knew that shepherds like David were extraordinarily proficient with a sling and stone. In Judges 20:16 we read that an army included 700 picked men and "everyone could sling a stone at a hair and not miss (כל־זה קלע באבן אל־השערה ולא יחטא)."

This is not a story of a miracle, it is a story of hubris. Goliath saw a little boy, but did not realize just how dangerous that boy could be.


Cultural and Historical Connections

The story of David and Goliath is nicely paralleled in the account of the battle between the Horatii and Curiatii in Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 1.24-26. Two sets of triplets are to fight as proxy on behalf of Rome (Horatii) and the city of Alba Longa (Curiatii). When two of the Horatii fall in the initial clash, the surviving triplet is indeed David facing Goliath. He manages to claw victory from the jaws of defeat by running around in such a way that he separated the three opponents and took care of them one at a time.

The concept is also nicely expressed in the movie Hoosiers, which tells the true story of a basketball team from a small town in Indiana which ends up facing a team from a considerably larger school in the State Finals.

King David -- The Original Guitar Hero

There's a word in the Hebrew Bible, selah (סלה), for which commentators have proposed multiple interpretations. That's usually a sign that no one really knows what it means.

The word selah occurs three times in the book of Habakkuk and seventy-one times in the book of Psalms. Each time it shows up, it seems to mark some kind of break in the flow of what's being said. (For a comprehensive look at what's been proposed, check out the Wikipedia article on selah.) It seems to be somehow related to the musical nature of the Psalms as they were originally performed, such as a musical interlude. (Prophets like Habakkuk also performed their prophesies musically, as you can see from the description of Ezekiel as a singer in Ezekiel 33:32.)

The hero David was known to play a mean harp in his day (see 1 Samuel 16:23). When he has to flee from King Saul, one of the places he sojourns is the land of Philistia (1 Samuel 21).

We know very little about the Philistines and their language, though there is increasing consensus that the Philistines could have been an Indo-European speaking people who settled on the coast of the Mediterranean as part of the "Sea Peoples" phenomenon of the 2nd Millenium BCE. (For a full study of Philistine language, see the Wikipedia article on the topic.)

 Whenever peoples live beside each other, they may fight but they also exchange products and, eventually, words. I am proposing that the word selah is a borrowing from the Philistines. Now, I'm not saying that King David himself is the one that brought it back or even that he necessarily wrote all of the Psalms attributed to him. (Though it does occur in many Psalms attributed to him [e.g., Psalms 3, 4, 9, 20, 21 et al.].)

So here's my theory. If Philistine is Indo-European and the word selah is a borrowing from them, it could be an etymological cognate to the word "solo." (The Proto-Indo-European root *solw- carries the meanings of "whole" and "alone" [cf., Latin solus 'alone' and Irish slán 'safe'].)

Musical notation is precisely where we tend to see word borrowing and then a tenacious preservation of terms. Notice how we still use Italian terms such as fortissimo and crescendo.

The possibility that selah indicated a musical interlude is not a new assertion. What I am saying, however, is that the word actually is related to the Italian word which we use even today to describe a musical solo.

Another example of how musical words tend to be borrowed, not created, is found in the word for "harp" or "lyre." What David played on is called, in Hebrew, a kinnor (כנור). But the Greeks called their instrument a kithara. (The word may be also related to the Old Persian sithar.) The Romans would borrow the word as cithara. It was borrowed by Semitic speaking peoples and shows up in Daniel 3:5 and the Odes of Solomon 6:1. It made its way into Arabic and then came back to Europe as … "guitar!"