HistoricalChristian.Faith

How Tall Was Goliath? (six or four cubits)

Related doctrines: Hard passages — see also Who Killed Goliath? (2 Samuel 21:19) · Solomon's Stalls: 40,000 or 4,000? (1 Kings 4:26 vs. 2 Chronicles 9:25) · Ahaziah's Age: 22 or 42? (2 Kings 8:26 vs. 2 Chronicles 22:2) · The Bronze Sea: 2,000 or 3,000 Baths? (1 Kings 7:26 vs. 2 Chronicles 4:5) · What Jesus Wrote on the Ground (John 8:6) · The Two Genealogies of Jesus (Matthew 1 vs. Luke 3) · The Death of Judas (Matthew 27 vs. Acts 1) · Naming the Wrong Prophet (Mark 1:2; Matthew 27:9) · Baptized for the Dead (1 Corinthians 15:29)

Everyone remembers Goliath as a nine-foot giant. The number comes from one verse — 1 Samuel 17:4 — and in the Masoretic Hebrew it reads "six cubits and a span." A cubit runs about eighteen inches and a span about nine, so the Masoretic Goliath stands roughly nine feet nine inches (~2.97 m). But the oldest witnesses to the verse do not agree. The Dead Sea Samuel scroll (4QSam^a), the Septuagint, and Josephus all give his height as "four cubits and a span" — about six feet nine (~2.06 m). The ESV prints "six" and footnotes the gap: "Hebrew; Septuagint, Dead Sea Scroll and Josephus four."¹ So this is not an internal contradiction between two biblical books — the way who killed Goliath is — but a textbook manuscript variant: one number in the Hebrew tradition that came down to us, a different number in the older Greek and Qumran tradition. It is a concrete, high-recognition instance of the same divergence between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text treated in principle on the Septuagint-vs.-Masoretic and Septuagint-origin pages.²

How much rides on the figure? For the story, remarkably little. Even the shorter Goliath — six foot nine — towered over an Iron-Age Israelite army whose male skeletal remains average only about five feet to five foot six; the well-preserved first-century skeleton from Giv‘at ha-Mivtar stood just under 5′6″. A near-seven-foot warrior in full bronze armor was still a monster to men that size. And 1 Samuel 9:2 had already said that Saul stood "from his shoulders and upward… higher than any of the people" — so on sheer height it was Saul, not the shepherd David, who should have answered the challenge; the point of the duel is who had God in his corner, not who was tallest.³ No skeleton of a nine- or ten-foot human has ever been recovered anywhere in the region.⁴ This page gathers the witnesses to the two readings, earliest first — the older "four" of the Greek and Qumran line, the "six" that fills the Latin, rabbinic, and Masoretic tradition, and the modern text-critics who reopened the question — and leaves "which number is original" to be weighed under Arguments.

Timeline

The Septuagint (Old Greek, c. 250 BC)

The oldest translation of the verse already reads "four." The Septuagint's 1 Kingdoms (= 1 Samuel) 17:4 has the champion come out of Gath "his height four cubits and a span."⁵ The reading is carried by the great uncials Vaticanus and Alexandrinus and by the Lucianic recension, so "four" was very probably the number in the Old Greek from the start — the Greek tradition's steady witness against the later Masoretic "six." ⁶

4QSam^a — the Dead Sea Samuel scroll (mid-1st c. BC)

The decisive witness is Hebrew. 4QSam^a, the Samuel scroll from Qumran and by a thousand years the oldest surviving Hebrew copy of this verse, reads "four cubits and a span" — agreeing with the Greek against the medieval Masoretic Text.⁷ Its discovery is what turned the question: the shorter number is no longer a Greek peculiarity to be discounted, but the reading of the oldest Hebrew manuscript we possess.

Josephus (c. 93)

Josephus, retelling the duel in the Antiquities, describes the champion as "a man of vast bulk, for he was of four cubits and a span in tallness."⁸ Writing in Greek from a Hebrew source, he is an independent first-century witness — neither Qumran scroll nor Septuagint codex — that the number known in his day was four.

Jerome and the Vulgate (c. 405)

With Jerome's Latin the "six" enters and fixes the Western Bible. Translating from the Hebrew of his day, he renders 1 Samuel 17:4 "his height was six cubits and a span" (sex cubitorum et palmo) — the Masoretic number, which through the Vulgate became the giant every Latin reader would know. ⁹

The Babylonian Talmud (c. 500)

The rabbinic tradition works entirely from the Masoretic Hebrew, and so from "six cubits and a span." The Talmud's Goliath haggadah (Sotah 42b) elaborates that text — his descent from Orpah, his taunts, his fall — without a hint of the shorter reading.¹⁰ Tellingly, the rabbis reserve genuinely cosmic giant-scale for Og of Bashan, not for Goliath, whose six cubits they take as an ordinary—if formidable—man's height.¹¹

Bede (c. 716)

The Latin West reads "six" as plain text and mines it for allegory. Bede, in his Commentary on Samuel, takes the giant "six cubits and a palm high" as a figure of the devil, who "boasts to be similar to the Most High" and so counterfeits the perfection God measures in six days of work — tying the six cubits to the six days of creation and to Ezekiel's measuring-reed "of six cubits and a palm."¹² He shows no awareness that any manuscript ever read four: for him "six" simply is the text.

The Masoretic codices — Aleppo and Leningrad (c. 930–1010)

The earliest complete Hebrew Bibles — the Aleppo and Leningrad codices, the manuscripts behind every printed Hebrew Bible — both read "six cubits and a span" (shesh ammot wa-zaret).¹³ They are the base of the "six" that stands in the Hebrew text and in the translations made from it — but they are also, by a thousand years, later than 4QSam^a, which reads four.

J. Daniel Hays and the modern text-critics (2005)

Modern criticism reopens the case for "four." J. Daniel Hays, gathering the witnesses (4QSam^a, Vaticanus, Josephus, the Lucianic Greek), argues that "four cubits and a span" is the original reading and the Masoretic "six" a later inflation — the giant swelling in transmission — a verdict shared in the main by the text-critical consensus (McCarter, Tov, Ulrich).¹⁴ The reading is not unopposed: Clyde Billington and William Barrick defend the Masoretic "six" (Billington reading the Greek "four" as a conversion into Egyptian royal cubits, and putting Goliath near eight feet), so the "which number is original" question remains genuinely argued.¹⁵

Arguments

The sub-claim that cuts across the timeline — not "who held which number, and when," but "which reading is original" — is weighed adversarially on its own page, with an assessment of the reading it serves. The shared floor here is narrower than on the companion Goliath crux: no one has to posit a scribal error to explain the variant, since the two numbers are simply attested in two manuscript families. What is in dispute is which family preserves the original — the older "four" of 4QSam^a, the Septuagint, and Josephus, or the Masoretic "six" — and, distinct from that, how tall Goliath really was.

• Is "four cubits and a span" the original reading of 1 Samuel 17:4 (the Masoretic "six" a later inflation)? — sound (that "four" is the earliest reading; the real-height question is left separately open).

Sources