How did David kill Goliath?

The duel in brief

The Philistines camp at Socoh in Judah, and Saul’s army faces them across the Valley of Elah (1 Samuel 17:1–3). For forty days Goliath of Gath offers single combat, and the loser’s people will serve the winner’s. Nobody in Israel moves. Then David arrives from Bethlehem with food for his brothers and tells Saul he will go. For the size of the man he faced, see how tall Goliath was.

Why David took off Saul’s armor

Saul dresses him for the fight Saul knows: a bronze helmet, a coat of mail, a sword. David tries a few steps and hands it all back. He has not tested it, and nobody tries out new armor on the day of battle. Readers often add that Saul stood head and shoulders above everyone (9:2), so his gear could hardly fit a young shepherd, but the text doesn’t say so.

The deeper reason is the plan. In bronze, David would fight on Goliath’s terms, at close quarters, where a huge man with a spear wins. With a sling he strikes from a distance. Goliath sees only the staff and sneers, “Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?” (17:43). David’s answer shows how he sees the fight.

Yahweh doesn’t save with sword and spear; for the battle is Yahweh’s, and he will give you into our hand.

That is the story’s own lesson: the victory belongs to God, so “that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel” (17:46). Later readers made the scene the pattern of every underdog fight.

Where the stone hit

David put his hand in his bag, took a stone and slung it, and struck the Philistine in his forehead. The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the earth.

Goliath wore a bronze helmet (17:5), yet the stone finds the one place it leaves bare. The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, says the stone went through the helmet. A modern suggestion notes that the Hebrew word for forehead, metsach, is close to the word for his bronze shin armor in verse 6, and pictures a stone to the leg that toppled him forward. Most translators keep the forehead. The narrator may enjoy the picture: in 1 Samuel 5:3 the statue of the Philistine god Dagon is found the same way, fallen on its face before the ark of Yahweh.

A stone or a sword?

Both, in two verses side by side. First the summary: “David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and struck the Philistine and killed him; but there was no sword in David’s hand” (17:50). Then the close-up: David runs, stands over the fallen man, draws Goliath’s sword, kills him and cuts off his head (17:51). The second verb is a different form, the one Samuel uses when Jonathan’s armor bearer finishes off men his master has already struck down (14:13). The stone won the fight. The sword ended it, and took the head David had promised that morning (17:46).

Goliath’s sword turns up years later, wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod at Nob, and David, by then a fugitive, takes it: “There is none like that. Give it to me” (21:9).

The Valley of Elah

Elah means terebinth, a tree of those hills. The valley runs west out of the Judean hills, southwest of Bethlehem, a natural corridor between Philistine country and Judah. Socoh and Azekah are still known ruin mounds along it, and Gath, Goliath’s city, lay near its western end at Tell es-Safi. Above the valley, excavations from 2007 uncovered Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fortified town from about David’s time with two gates. Its excavator, Yosef Garfinkel, proposed it was Shaaraim, “two gates,” on the Philistines’ line of flight (17:52). Others disagree. On David’s age that day, see how old he was.