Michael S. Heiser

Goliath may have been killed three thousand years ago, but he’s still an imposing obstacle—this time to Bible scholars. But how can a story so easily followed by children be a conundrum for scholars? It happens all the time when you study Hebrew manuscripts.

The story of David and Goliath (1 Sam 17) presents a number of thorny problems to textual critics, scholars who specialize in studying manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible to determine the precise reading of the original text. Let’s look at two examples.

How Tall Was Goliath?

First Samuel 17:4 notes that Goliath’s height was measured at “six cubits and one span,” about nine feet, six inches. That measurement comes from one Hebrew manuscript tradition, known as the Masoretic text, a text that was fixed around 100 AD by the Jewish community in Israel. We know from the Dead Sea Scrolls that there were other editions of the Hebrew Bible. One of those was the Hebrew text from which the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament,1 was translated. The Septuagint at times disagrees with the Masoretic text. The Septuagint has the height of Goliath at four cubits and one span, or about six feet, six inches. The only Hebrew text of 1 Sam 17:4 found among the Dead Sea Scrolls also reads “four,” and the Jewish historian Josephus describes Goliath as, “a man of vast bulk, for he was of four cubits and a span in tallness.2”

The textual evidence is clearly on the side of the shorter Goliath, but that has no real importance for interpretation. Archaeologists have long noted that male human skeletal remains from the biblical period have an average height of slightly less than five and a half feet, so even the shorter Goliath was quite a bit taller than most people the Israelites had ever seen.3 The relatively diminutive stature of Israelites also helps us understand the comment in 1 Sam 9:2, that “from his shoulders upward [Saul] was taller than any of the people.” Saul should have been the one fighting Goliath, not David, and so the story makes clear who had God in his corner. Saul had been rejected as king; David was now Israel’s champion.

A Man of Vast Bulk: Goliath's Height