3. the hill on one side . . . the hill on the other . . . the ravine between them. As we have seen before, this positioning of the opposing armies on opposite hilltops was a characteristic procedure of warfare in the hilly terrain of central Israel. But the opening verses also set up the strong spatial perspective through which this episode is organized. The perspective of the previous story was implicitly vertical: from God above to Samuel below, in the household of Jesse in Bethlehem. Here, by contrast, is a richly elaborated horizontal deployment of troops and individuals. God is out of the picture, except for the invocation through David’s words.

4. the champion. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “the man between”—that is, the man who goes out between the opposed battle lines to fight a counterpart. That particular Hebrew term thus reinforces the spatial definition of the story.

six cubits and a span. This would make him over eight feet tall.

5–6. A bronze helmet . . . armor of mail . . . greaves of bronze . . . a spear of bronze. This “Homeric” enumeration of armor and weapons is quite untypical of the Hebrew Bible. The thematic effect is clear: Goliath is represented as a hulking man of material military impedimenta—everything is given gargantuan size or weight, again with untypical specification. All this will be counterposed to David’s declaration on the battlefield that “not by sword nor spear does the LORD deliver.”

five thousand bronze shekels. The armor alone is about 125 pounds.

7. his shield bearer went before him. For this reason the shield is not included in the catalogue of Goliath’s armor. The gargantuan proportions of his dependence on the material implements of warfare are reinforced by the fact that he enters the battlefield with a man walking before him carrying his (presumably massive) shield.

8. Am I not the Philistine. Most often in the body of the story he is referred to as “the Philistine” and not by the name Goliath. This has led many scholars to infer that a tradition about Goliath was superimposed on an original story featuring an archetypal “Philistine.”

9. we shall be slaves to you. In the event, this condition is not fulfilled: the Philistines retreat in disarray, but will later regroup to continue their war against the Israelites.

10. I am the one who has insulted the Israelite lines. Nearly all the English versions render the verb here as “defied,” which is one end of the semantic range of the Hebrew ḥeref. But the verb is transparently linked with the noun ḥerpah—insult, disgrace, shame. By his taunting words, Goliath has laid an insult on Israel that only a victorious champion can “take away” (see verse 26).

11. And Saul heard . . . and they were dismayed. Saul, as the man head and shoulders taller than all the people, might be thought to be the one Israelite fighter who stands a chance against Goliath. Instead, he leads his own troops in fearfulness: the stage is set for his deplacement by David.

12. David was the son of this Ephrathite man. The use of the demonstrative pronoun “this” is peculiar. It seems to be the first of several attempts (presumably, by the redactor) to harmonize this account of David’s debut in Saul’s court with the previous one, by referring to Jesse as someone already mentioned. Polzin has noted that demonstrative pronouns are unusually prominent in this whole episode: in many instances, they express contempt (“this Philistine”), but they are also sometimes necessary pointers in the emphatically spatial organization of the story.

15. And David would go back and forth from Saul’s side. The last phrase has a sense close to “from Saul’s presence” and is another strategem for harmonizing the two episodes. It invites us to suppose that David divided his time between playing the lyre for Saul and tending his father’s flocks. The implicit assumption, however, of the story that unfolds is that David is unknown in the court of Saul, and that any to-and-fro movement between Bethlehem and the front would be to bring provisions to his older brothers.

17. Take, pray, to your brothers. If Saul has organized a standing army, it seems that his quartermaster corps still leaves something to be desired, and whatever rations may be provided for the troops need to be supplemented. In the same connection of skimpy provisions, Jesse sends a gift of ten wedges of cheese to his sons’ commander.

18. take their token. Jesse expects his sons to send back some object with David as assurance that they are alive and well.

20. the staging ground. The Hebrew is literally “the circle,” but the context (and a few allied ones elsewhere in the Bible) suggests a technical military sense.

22. David left the gear that was on him with the keeper. The phrase used precisely echoes his leaving the flock with a keeper. The narrative invokes a series of divestments by David of impediments for which he has been made responsible—flock, provisions, and then Saul’s armor.

25. the man who strikes him down the king will enrich . . . and his daughter he will give him. It is at this point that the folkloric background of the second story of David’s debut becomes particularly clear. The folktale pattern is one that is very familiar from later European tradition: a community is threatened by a giant, ogre, or dragon that nobody can face. The king offers great wealth, and the hand of his daughter, to the man who can slay the giant. A young man from the provinces then appears on the scene, who in his youth and slight stature seems quite unfit for the daunting challenge, but by wit and resourcefulness, using unexpected means, he conquers the ogre. The appeal of this archetypal folktale no doubt made it attractive for inclusion in the David narrative. What must be emphasized, however, is that the folkloric materials have been historicized and even to an extent psychologized. The slaying of the giant becomes an emblem for Israel’s prevailing over the numerically superior forces all around it as well as for the resourcefulness of its first dynastic king in securing power. The dialogue between David and his oldest brother vividly evokes a thick background of sibling jealousies. And David appears here—in the first scene in which he is assigned speech in the narrative—as a poised master of rhetoric, who knows how to use publicly enunciated words to achieve political ends.

26. And David said . . . , “What will be done for the man.” These are David’s first recorded words in the narrative—usually, in biblical narrative convention, a defining moment of characterization. His first words express his wanting to know what will be gained—implicitly, in political terms—by the man who defeats Goliath. The inquiry about personal profit is then immediately balanced (or covered up) by the patriotic pronouncement “who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should insult the battle lines of the living God?” David has, of course, just heard one of the troops stipulate the reward for vanquishing the Philistine, but he wants to be perfectly sure before he makes his move, and so he asks for the details to be repeated. One sees how the folktale has been artfully historicized, subtly drawn into the realm of politics and individualized character.

28. that bit of flock. Eliab prefixes a term of diminution, meʿat, to “flock” to express his contempt for David. The demonstrative pronoun, as elsewhere in the chapter, is also contemptuous, even as it points to the spatial distance between the battlefield and the pastureland around Bethlehem.

I’m the one who knows. The relative clause here reflects the special emphasis of the Hebrew first-person pronoun ʾani, which ordinarily would not be used because the verb that follows it, yadʿati, has a first-person ending. The same structure occurs in Goliath’s boasting speech in verse 10.

your wicked impulses. The literal meaning of the Hebrew is “the wickedness of your heart,” the heart being in biblical language the seat of understanding and the place where plans or desires are shaped.

29. It was only talk. The translation follows an interpretation that goes back to the Aramaic Targum of Late Antiquity and to Rashi in the Middle Ages. But the Hebrew—literally, “Is it not a word?”—is gnomic. The ambiguity is compounded because davar can mean “word,” “message,” “matter,” “thing,” “mission,” and more.

30. And he turned away from him toward someone else. Ignoring his brother’s rebuke, David wants to hear the details of the reward a third time.

32. Let no man’s heart fail him. The Septuagint has “Let not my lord’s heart fail him,” but this could easily be an explanatory gloss. David uses a generalizing phrase because he doesn’t want to come out and say directly what all can see, that the king’s heart is failing him (literally, “falling”).

34. A shepherd has your servant been. David’s carefully contrived speech proclaims his tested courage and strength but, interestingly, is silent about the shepherd’s weapon—the slingshot—that he intends to use against Goliath.

35. from his clutches. The Hebrew says literally, “from his mouth.”

I would seize his beard. This of course refers only to the lion, not to the bear, but this sort of focusing of the narrative report on one of its two instances is perfectly natural in biblical usage, and no emendation of the word for “beard” is called for.

37. And David said. This is a particularly striking instance of the biblical convention that can be schematized as: And X said to Y; (no response from Y); and X said to Y, with the intervening silence being dramatically significant. Saul is nonplussed by these extravagant claims on the part of the young shepherd from Bethlehem, and he doesn’t know what to say. David, observing the skepticism of his interlocutor, now invokes God by way of explanation (“The LORD who has rescued me from the lion and the bear”). This theological argument persuades Saul. For another instance of the X said to Y, X said to Y convention, compare Goliath’s boast and Israel’s silence in verses 8–10.

38. his own battle garb. The Hebrew madim is not the ordinary term for “garment” but is most often used for the special garments worn either by men in battle or by priests in the cult (hence the present translation adds “battle”). The fact that this word is related etymologically to midah, proportion or measure, is relevant to the incident as it unfolds, since David is clothed in battle gear too big for him.

39. he was unable to walk. The translation, with the Septuagint, reads wayilʾe, instead of the Masoretic wayoʾel (a simple reversal of letters in the consonantal text), which would yield “he undertook to walk.”

I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it. David states the obvious fact that, as a shepherd boy, he is not used to marching about in heavy armor, with a big sword. What he chooses not to mention is that since this is the armor of the hulking Saul, it is in any case far too big for him. Thematically, heroic fitness will be seen to reside in something other than being head and shoulders taller than all the people, or six cubits tall, like Goliath.

40. he took his stick. That is, his shepherd’s staff, which he is used to carrying. David evidently does this as a decoy, encouraging Goliath to imagine he will use cudgel against sword (compare verse 43) and thus camouflaging the lethal slingshot.

45. You come to me with sword and spear and javelin. This short list of weapons harks back to the epic catalogue of weapons and armor that introduced Goliath to the story. David’s rejoinder to the Philistine is couched in impeccable terms of standard Israelite belief: as in the Psalms, it is not sword or might that gives victory but the LORD. David speaks almost as though he expects to prevail through a miracle of divine intervention (“all the earth shall know that Israel has a God!”), but in fact his victory depends on his resourcefulness in exploiting an unconventional weapon, one which he would have learned to use skillfully as a shepherd.

46. Your corpse and the corpses. This is the reading of the Septuagint. The Masoretic Text lacks “your corpse.”

48. David hastened and ran out from the lines toward the Philistine. This last gesture would encourage the Philistine to think David was rushing up for the awaited hand-to-hand combat. In fact, David is darting in close enough to get a good shot with his sling. To do this (verse 49), he will break his charge, stop, and let fly with the sling.

51. took the sword . . . and finished him off. The gigantic Philistine is stunned but perhaps not dead, and so David completes his kill with the sword he takes from the prostrate Goliath.

52. to the ravine. The Septuagint corrects gayʿ to Gath, with the end of this verse in mind. But there is a ravine between the two hills on which the armies are encamped, and what the narrator may be saying is that the Philistines fled westward by way of the ravine to their own territory.

54. brought it to Jerusalem. This notation is problematic because Jerusalem at this point is still a Jebusite city. The report is either proleptic or simply out of place chronologically. David’s bringing the sword into his tent may also be questionable because, as someone who has not been a member of the army, he would have no tent. Some scholars, influenced by the fact that Goliath’s sword later appears in the sanctuary at Nob, have proposed reading here “in the tent of the LORD.”

55. Whose son is the lad, Abner? It is at this point that the evident contradiction between the two stories of David’s debut is most striking. If David had been attending Saul in court as his personal music therapist, with Saul having explicitly sent a communication to Jesse regarding David’s entering his service, how could he, and Abner as well, now be ignorant of David’s identity? Efforts to harmonize the two stories in terms of the logic of later conventions of realism seem unconvincing (for example, amnesia has been proposed as a symptom of Saul’s mental illness, and Abner pretends not to recognize David in deference to the ailing king). The prevalent scholarly view that chapters 16 and 17 represent two different traditions about David’s beginnings is persuasive. (To complicate matters, most scholars detect two different strands in chapter 17.) What we need to ask, however, is why the redactor set these two stories in immediate sequence, despite the contradictions that must have been as evident to him as to us. A reasonable conclusion is that for the ancient audience, and for the redactor, these contradictions would have been inconsequential in comparison with the advantage gained in providing a double perspective on David. In the Greek tradition, there were competing versions of the same myths, but never in a single text. Modern Western narrative generally insists on verisimilar consistency. In the Bible, however, the variants of a single story are sometimes placed in a kind of implicit dialogue with one another (compare the two accounts of creation at the beginning of Genesis). Here, in the first, vertically oriented story, with its explicit instructions from God to man, David is emphatically elected by God, is associated with the spirit and with song, and gains entrée in the court of Saul by using song to master the spirit. In the second story, with its horizontal deployment in space, David makes his way into Saul’s presence through martial prowess, exhibiting shrewdness, calculation, and rhetorical skill. Interestingly, it is this folktale version of David’s debut rather than the theological one that will lead directly into the historical (or at least, history-like) narrative of David’s rise and David’s reign. But the redactor must surely have felt that both the “spiritual” and the political-military sides of the figure of David had to be represented in the account of his origins. It is also noteworthy that this whole episode, which launches David on his trajectory to the throne, ends with Saul once more in a state of ignorance, compelled to ask twice about David’s identity, and getting no answer until David himself speaks out.