Goliath

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Blah me thinks.

[edit] The killing

The Bible itself is contradictory about the slaying of Goliath.

I Samuel 17:23, 50

The champion, the Philistine of Gath, Goliath by name...David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone and struck the Philistine and killed him.^[1]

II Samuel 21:19

And there was again war with the Philistines at Gob; and Elhanan the son of Joareoregim, the Bethlehemite, slew Goliath the Gittite.^[1]

Gittite translates as "man of Gath"^[1], which makes it possible that the passage is a reference to the same person as in I Sam 17. The translators of the King James Version of the Bible attempted to reconcile this problem by drawing on I Chron. 20:5, which states that Elhanan actually killed Goliath's brother Lami. Thus, II Sam 21:19 in the King James Version now reads;

Elhanan, the son of Joareoregim, the Bethlehemite, slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite

In the Masoretic Text before the translation the words "brother of" do not appear in that verse.^[2] We also get several verses that seem to support Elhanan as the slayer of Goliath. Overall, this entire question is quite difficult, with several different sources being involved, and some parts of the text possibly being corrupted. As is often the case with the Tanakh, the lack of contemporary sources further complicates matters, there being several differences between the different versions in the Septuagint, the Masoretic Text, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[edit] Two different narratives

In the version crediting David in I Sam. 17, after Goliath is slain, Saul says,

Whose son is this youth? And Abner said, As thy soul liveth, O king, I cannot tell. And the king said, Inquire thou whose son the stripling is.

This seems inconsistent with the preceding narrative in I Sam 16:14-23, where David enters Saul's service as his armor-bearer. The most likely explanation for this discontinuity between chapters 16 and 17 is that certain parts of chapter 17, and possibly also parts of chapter 18, in fact comes from a different source which has been interlaced into the narrative.^[3] This is particularly evident from the passage I Sam 17:12-15, which gives an apparently unnecessary second introduction of David. This would make better sense if chapter 17 is in fact an independent narrative from a different source.