Goliath
Goliath (Hebrew: גָּלְיָת, Modern: Golyat, Tiberian: Golyāṯ; Arabic: جالوت , Ǧālūt (Qur’anic term), جليات Ǧulyāt (Christian term)), known also as Goliath of Gath (one of five city states of the Philistines), is a figure in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament). Described as a giant Philistine warrior, he is famous for his combat with the young David, the future king of Israel. The battle between them is described in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and, more briefly, in the Qur'an.
Post-Classical Jewish traditions stressed Goliath’s status as the representative of paganism, in contrast to David, the champion of the God of Israel. Christian tradition gave him a distinctively Christian twist, seeing in David’s battle with Goliath the Church’s struggle against Satan.[1]
The story
The account of the battle between David and Goliath is given in 1 Samuel, chapter 17.[2] Saul and the Israelites are facing the Philistines at the Valley of Elah. Twice a day for forty days, 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. However, Saul and all the other Israelites are afraid of him. By chance, David is present, having brought food for his elder brothers. Told that Saul has promised to reward any man who defeats Goliath, David accepts the challenge. Saul reluctantly agrees and offers his armor, which David declines, taking only his sling and five stones chosen in a brook.
David and Goliath confront each other, Goliath with his armor and shield, David with his staff and sling. “The Philistine cursed David by his gods,” but David replies: “This day the LORD will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down, and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that God saves not with sword and spear; for the battle is God’s, and he will give you into our hand.”[3]
David hurls his sling with all his might,and hits Goliath in the center of his forehead. The Philistine falls on his face to the ground, David takes Goliath’s sword and 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 David to him. The king asks whose son he is, and David answers, ‘I am the son of your servant Jesse the Bethlehemite.’”
Textual considerations
Goliath’s height
The oldest manuscripts - 4QSam(a), the Dead Sea Scrolls text of Samuel), the first-century A.D. historian Josephus and the fourth century A.D. Septuagint manuscripts - all give the height of Goliath as “four cubits and a span”, about six and a half feet tall.[4] Later manuscripts increase his height to “six cubits and a span,” which would make him over nine feet tall.[5] Hebrew uses letters to denote numbers, and it is possible that the original letter dalet, or "four", became confused for vav, "six", between the earliest manuscripts and the later ones.
David’s age
The earliest manuscripts, such as the fourth-century A.D. Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 do not contain the verses describing David coming each day with food for his brothers, nor 1 Samuel 17:55–58 in which Saul seems unaware of David’s identity, referring to him as “this youth” and asking Abner to find out the name of his father. The narrative therefore reads that Goliath challenges the Israelites to combat, the Israelites are afraid, and David, already with Saul, accepts the challenge.[6] This removes a number of ambiguities which have puzzled commentators: it removes 1 Samuel 17:55–58 in which Saul seems not to know David, despite having taken him as his shield-bearer and harpist; it removes 1 Samuel 17:50, the presence of which makes it seem as if David kills Goliath twice, once with his sling and then again with a sword;[7] and it gives David a clear reason, as Saul’s personal shield-bearer, for accepting Goliath’s challenge. Scholars drawing on studies of oral transmission and folklore have concluded that the non-Septuagint material “is a folktale grafted onto the initial text of … 1 Samuel.”[8]
Elhanan and Goliath
Goliath makes another appearance in Samuel at 2 Samuel 21:19,[9] which tells how Goliath was killed by “Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite.” The fourth-century B.C. 1 Chronicles 20[10] explains the second Goliath by saying that Elhanan “slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath,” apparently constructing the name Lahmi from the last portion of the word “Bethlehemite” (“beit-ha’lahmi”).[11] The King James Bible translators adopted this into their translation of 2 Samuel 21:18–19, although the Hebrew text at this point makes no mention of the word “brother.” David’s opponent probably had no name originally, being referred to simply as “the Philistine” (the name Goliath is applied to him only twice in 1 Samuel 17), and that the name Goliath was a later addition from the Elhanan story.[12]
Goliath and the Philistines
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 destroyed in the ninth century B.C., an event from which it never recovered. A potsherd discovered at the site, and reliably dated to the tenth to mid-ninth centuries B.C., is inscribed with the two names “alwt” 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 late-tenth/early-ninth-century B.C. 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.[13] 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.”[14]
Goliath and the Greeks
In 2004 Azzan Yadin suggested that the armor described in 1 Samuel 17 is typical of Greek armor of the sixth century B.C. rather than of Philistines armor of the tenth century, and that narrative formulae such as the settlement of battle by single combat between champions is characteristic of the Homeric epics (the Iliad) but not of the ancient Near East. Yadin also suggested that the designation of Goliath as a איש הביניים, “man of the in-between” (a longstanding difficulty in translating 1 Samuel 17) appears to be a borrowing from Greek “man of the metaikhmion (μεταίχμιον).”[15]
Martin Litchfield West has pointed out that a story very similar to that of David and Goliath appears in the Iliad, where the young Nestor fights and conquers the giant Ereuthalion.[16] 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 gods (or, in David’s case, God) comes to the young hero’s 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 booty, and the boy-hero is acclaimed by the people.[17]
Later traditions
Jewish
According to the Babylonian Talmud (Sotah 42b) he was a son of Orpah, the sister-in-law of Ruth, David's own 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.[18]
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 in order to disturb the Israelites in their prayers. His armour weighed 60 tons, according to rabbi Hanina; 120, according to rabbi Abba bar Kahana; and his sword, which became the sword of David, had marvellous powers. On his death it was found that his heart carried the image of Dagon, who thereby also came to a shameful downfall.[19]
In Pseudo-Philo, believed to have been composed between 135 B.C.E. and 70 C.E., David picks up seven stones and writes on them the names of his fathers, his own name, and the name of God, one name per stone; then, speaking to Goliath, he says: "Hear this word before you die: were not the two woman from whom you and I were born, sisters? And your mother was Orpah and my mother Ruth..." After David strikes Goliath with the stone he runs to Goliath before he dies and Goliath says, "Hurry and kill me and rejoice," and 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.[20]
Christianity
The early Christian church found a rich lode of metaphors in the stories of David: David's marriage of Bathsheba was seen as a model of the church's wooing of the community of believers away from the discredited Jewish faith, his speech to followers during the flight from Absalom was a prefiguring of Jesus's farewell speech to his disciples, and the battle with Goliath symbolised the church's eternal but victorious battle with Satan.[21]
The Italian Goliath film series (1960-1964)
The Italians used Goliath as an action superhero in a series of Biblical adventure films (peplums) in the early 1960s. He was possessed of amazing strength, and the films were similar in theme to their Hercules and Maciste movies. After the classic Hercules (1958) became a blockbuster sensation in the film industry, a 1959 Steve Reeves film Terrore dei Barbari(Terror of the Barbarians) was retitled Goliath and the Barbarians in the USA, (after Joseph E. Levine claimed the sole right to the name of Hercules); the film was so successful at the box office, it inspired Italian filmmakers to do a series of 4 more films featuring a beefcake hero named Goliath, although the films were not really related to each other. (The 1960 Italian film David and Goliath starring Orson Welles was not one of these, since that movie was a straightforward adaptation of the Biblical story). The 4 titles in the Italian Goliath series were as follows:
- Goliath contro i giganti/Goliath Against the Giants (1960) starring Brad Harris
- Goliath e la schiava ribelle/Goliath and the Rebel Slave (a.k.a. The Tyrant of Lydia Vs. The Son of Hercules) (1963) starring Gordon Scott
- Golia e il cavaliere mascherato/Goliath and the Masked Rider (a.k.a. Hercules and the Masked Rider) (1964) starring Alan Steel
- Golia alla conquista di Bagdad/Goliath at the Conquest of Baghdad(a.k.a. Goliath at the Conquest of Damascus, 1964) starring Peter Lupus
The name Goliath was later inserted into the film titles of 3 other Italian muscleman movies that were retitled for distribution in the USA in an attempt to cash in on the Goliath craze, but these films were not originally made as Goliath movies in Italy. Both Goliath and the Vampires (1961) and Goliath and the Sins of Babylon (1963) actually featured the famed superhero Maciste in the original Italian versions, but American distributors didn't feel the name Maciste had any meaning to American audiences. Goliath and the Dragon (1960) was originally an Italian Hercules movie called The Revenge of Hercules, and it is a mystery to this day why U.S. distributors didn't market the film under that title, since the Hercules films always tended to do much better at the box office than Goliath movies.
Goliath in Culture
The 1986 film Hoosiers involves a final scene which a small-town high school basketball team takes on a big-city team for the Indiana state championship. In the final moments before the small-town team from "Hickory" takes the court, the passage describing how, "David took a stone from the bag and slung it... knocking the Philistine to the ground" is read to inspire the team.
Italian stunt actor Giorgio Francesco Palombi portrayed this nine feet giant in TNT's 1997 live-action telefilm.
In 2005, Lightstone Studios released a direct-to-DVD movie musical titled "One Smooth Stone," which was later changed to "David and Goliath." It is part of the Liken the Scriptures (now just Liken) series of movie musicals on DVD based on scripture stories. Thurl Bailey, a former NBA basketball player, was cast to play the part of Goliath in this film.
The television show Kings portrayed Goliath as a tank in the military of the modern version of Gath, and is seen destroyed by a young David.
In the first episode of the second season of the television series Knight Rider in 1983 entitled "Goliath," Goliath was the name given to a large and seemingly indestructible tractor-trailer driven by the villain, Garthe Knight. After an initial victory against Michael Knight and the Knight Industries Two Thousand, Garthe and Goliath are in the end defeated by the smaller KITT.[22]
See also
- Battle of Ain Jalut ('Battle of Goliath Well')
- List of artifacts significant to the Bible
- Sword and sandal (film genre)
References
- ^ The metaphorical interpretations of David and other Jewish scriptures are scattered through the early Christian writers such as Augustine. For an overview of the David story in Western literature going beyond both Goliath and the early Patrisitic period, see Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (eds.), “The David Myth in Western Literature” (1979). The book is somewhat rare: for an on-line review, see JSTOR (registration required).
- ^ 1sam 17.
- ^ English translations give “The Lord” at this point for the Hebrew YHWH, which is not normally written in full.
- ^ Outline of then textual history of Samuel.[dead link]
- ^ Variants of Bible Manuscripts.
- ^ Compare texts of short and long versions of 1 Samuel 17.
- ^ 1 Samuel 17:49 describes how David “took out a stone, and slung it, and struck (נכה) the Philistine on his forehead … and he fell on his face to the ground”; 17:50 describes how “David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and struck the Philistine, and killed him”; 1 Samuel 17:51 describes how David “took [Goliath’s] sword and drew it out of its sheath, and killed (מות) him, and cut off his head with it.”
- ^ See end of section, “The Effects of Oral Tradition”.
- ^ 2 Samuel 21[dead link]
- ^ 1 Chronicles 20[dead link]
- ^ Ralph W. Klein, Narrative Texts: Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah, see section “Representative Changes in Chronicles of Texts Taken from Samuel-Kings”. Compare 1 Samuel 16:1, “I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite (beit-ha’lahmi), for I have found among his sons a king for me.”
- ^ David’s Secret Demons, Baruch Halpern, 2004.
- ^ Tell es-Safi/Gath weblog. and Bar-Ilan University.; For the editio princeps and an in-depth discussion of the inscription, see now: Maeir, A.M., Wimmer, S.J., Zukerman, A., and Demsky, A. 2008 (In press). An Iron Age I/IIA Archaic Alphabetic Inscription from Tell es-Safi/Gath: Paleography, Dating, and Historical-Cultural Significance. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research.
- ^ Tall tale of a Philistine: researchers unearth a Goliath cereal bowl - Science.
- ^ Azzan Yadin’s “Goliath’s Armor and the Israelite Collective Memory,” appeared in Vetus Testamentum 54:373–95 (2004). See also Israel Finkelstein, “The Philistines in the Bible: A Late Monarchic Perspective,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, 27:131:67. For a brief online overview, see Higgaion, a blog by Christopher Heard, Associate Professor of Religion at Pepperdine University.
- ^ Homer, Iliad Book 7 ll.132–160.
- ^ M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon. West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry and Myth, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1997 pp. 370, 376.
- ^ Jerusalem Talmud Yebamoth, 24b.
- ^ For a brief overview of Talmudic traditions on Goliath, see Jewish Encyclopedia, "Goliath".
- ^ Charlesworth, James H. 1983. The Old Testament pseudepigrapha vol 2. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.ISBN 0-385-18813-7 p. 374.
- ^ The metaphorical interpretations of David and other Jewish scriptures are to be found scattered through the early Christian writers such as Augustine; for an overview of the David story in Western literature going well beyond both Goliath and the early Patrisitic period, see Raymond-Jean Frontain and Jan Wojcik (eds.), "The David Myth in Western Literature (1979). The book is somewhat rare: for an on-line review, see JSTOR (registration required).
- ^ "IMDb "Knight Rider" Goliath (1983)". Retrieved August 17, 2010.