HistoricalChristian.Faith

Who Killed Goliath? (2 Samuel 21:19)

Related doctrines: Hard passages — see also How Tall Was Goliath? (six or four cubits) · 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 knows David killed Goliath. But the Hebrew Bible says it twice, and the second time it names a different man. In 1 Samuel 17 the shepherd David fells the champion of Gath; yet 2 Samuel 21:19, listing David's later Philistine wars, reads — in the Masoretic Hebrew — "Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite, struck down Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver's beam." The parallel in 1 Chronicles 20:5 has a third form: "Elhanan the son of Jair struck down Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite." Three verses, one clause, and a famous name that will not sit still.

The oldest solutions harmonize. The King James and NIV simply import Chronicles' "the brother of" into 2 Samuel — the NIV's own footnote conceding that "the Hebrew does not have the brother of" — while the ESV keeps the literal "struck down Goliath" and notes, "Contrast 1 Chronicles 20:5, which may preserve the original reading."¹ That is the shape of the whole debate. Nearly every serious reader — ancient rabbi, Reformation Hebraist, modern text-critic alike — agrees on one thing: the Masoretic text of 2 Samuel 21:19 has suffered in copying, and one of the two texts has been changed. What is genuinely disputed is the direction of the change. Does 1 Chronicles 20:5 preserve the original ("Elhanan slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath"), which a scribe corrupted into Samuel's flat "Elhanan slew Goliath"? Or is Samuel's harder reading the older one, and Chronicles the Chronicler's harmonizing correction — so that "most scholars dismiss the later 1 Chronicles 20:5 material as 'an obvious harmonization'"?²

The dispute is a chain of small Hebrew slips: the first ʾōregîm ("weavers") duplicated from the "weaver's beam" at the verse's end; the object-marker ʾet confused with ʾaḥî ("brother of"), whose letters resemble it; "Lahmi" (laḥmî) against "the Bethlehemite" (bêt hallaḥmî). Which way those slips ran is the crux — and it makes this small verse a concrete, high-recognition instance of the very divergence between the Hebrew and Greek textual traditions treated in principle on the Septuagint-vs.-Masoretic, Septuagint-origin, and Old Testament canon pages: here the Septuagint already carries the corruption, and even the Dead Sea Samuel scroll leaves it unresolved, so the fault is demonstrably old. This page gathers the witnesses to the crux, earliest first — the harmonizers who kept a single Goliath and the critics who reopened the question — and leaves the direction of the corruption to be weighed under Arguments.

Timeline

Josephus (c. 93)

Josephus is the earliest witness to feel the difficulty, and the earliest to smooth it. Retelling 1 Samuel 17 he keeps David the slayer of the named Goliath, "cut off his head with his own sword… but David carried the head of Goliath into his own tent."³ Yet when he reaches the giant-wars of 2 Samuel 21, he renders the Elhanan of verse 19 as "Nephan his kinsman," who "fought in a single combat with the stoutest of all the Philistines, and slew him" — and the name Goliath never recurs in Book 7.⁴ By reserving the name for David's victim and leaving Nephan's giant anonymous, he leaves his narrative with a single Goliath, killed by David: the harmonization achieved by silent omission.

Targum Jonathan (c. 400)

The Aramaic Targum Jonathan makes explicit what Josephus implied: Elhanan simply is David. Reading the strange patronymic as a bundle of titles, it renders the verse "And David the son of Jesse, weaver of the curtains of the sanctuary, killed Goliath the Gittite, the wood of whose spear was like a weaver's heddle rod."⁵ It is a solution by exegesis, not emendation: the consonants stand, but "Jaare-oregim the Bethlehemite" becomes a description of David, and the verse restates 1 Samuel 17 instead of competing with it — the fountainhead of the rabbinic Elhanan-=-David reading.

Pseudo-Jerome, Hebrew Questions (traditionally c. 400)

The Christian-Latin form of the same identification. The Quaestiones Hebraicae in libros Regum et Paralipomenon, read for centuries as Jerome's but now judged spurious, translates "Elhanan" as Adeodatus ("God-given") and argues from the etymologies — and from the chapter's closing note that the giants "fell by the hand of David" — that "Adeodatus is David himself… called Adeodatus because he was chosen by God for the kingdom."⁶ Tellingly, its parallel note on 1 Chronicles 20:5 takes the other harmonizing road — David killed Goliath, Elhanan killed Goliath's brother — so the two Christian solutions to the crux sit unreconciled in one book. (The authorship and date are uncertain; the c. 400 is the traditional ascription, not a secure one.)

Rashi (c. 1090)

Rashi, the pre-eminent medieval Jewish commentator, fixes the Targum's reading as standard: "Elhanan — David. We know that it was David who killed Goliath in Shmuel I, 17:51, consequently this Elhanan must be David."⁷ He glosses the patronymic through the same "weaver of the sanctuary curtains" image — a single Goliath, and 2 Samuel 21:19 a poetic byname for David.

David Kimhi — Radak (c. 1200)

Radak reports both answers — the Chronicles-harmonization (the man slain was Goliath's kinsman) and the Targum's identification of Elhanan with David — and then does what the harmonizers rarely do: he confesses the identification puzzles him. Having quoted the Targum's "David… killed Goliath," he adds, "but as to why [Scripture] called David 'Elhanan,' I do not know the reason for it."⁸ His candor at the seam is the medieval tradition's admission that the authoritative reading does not really explain the odd name.

Benjamin Kennicott (1753)

With Benjamin Kennicott, the Oxford Hebraist whose manuscript collations founded modern Old Testament text-criticism, the verse becomes a demonstration that the printed Hebrew is not inerrant. "Goliath the Gittite was slain by David," he reasons, "and therefore there must have been a Mistake of some Transcriber here"; the reading of 1 Chronicles 20:5 — "Elhanan… slew Lahmi the Brother of Goliath" — is "plain and consistent," and "these words have evidently been corrupted into the words now found in Samuel."⁹ He reconstructs the corruption letter by letter, and so opens the case that Chronicles preserves the original.

Julius Wellhausen (1871)

Julius Wellhausen, in his monograph on the text of Samuel, isolates the mechanical fault — "the spelling Jaare instead of Jair… was probably occasioned by the following oregim ('weavers'), whose accidental intrusion from the line below is easy to recognize" — but warns against the easy fix of importing the Chronicler's smoother text, "given his tendency to avoid archaisms."¹⁰ He thus reverses Kennicott's direction: the Chronicler is a reviser, so Samuel is likely primary and Chronicles the correction.

Keil & Delitzsch (c. 1875)

The standard conservative commentary of Keil & Delitzsch reaches Kennicott's verdict by the opposite instinct — to restore, not to concede. The two verses "presuppose the same original text, so that the difference can only have arisen from an error in copying"; therefore "we must regard the reading in the Chronicles as the correct one, and alter our text accordingly; since the assumption that there were two Goliaths is a very improbable one."¹¹ Chronicles is original; Samuel is emended to match it, and David remains the sole slayer of Goliath.

S. R. Driver (1890)

S. R. Driver's Notes gives the classic argument for the reverse. Weighing the two readings, he finds it "scarcely credible that a scribe having before him a text identical with that of [Chronicles]… could, with the knowledge of I 17 that he must have possessed, have so altered… it as to make it state that 'Elhanan… slew Goliath of Gath!'" — whereas "a motive for the correction of the text of Samuel by the Chronicler… is obvious."¹² On the principle of the harder reading, Samuel is prior and Chronicles the harmonization — the line that becomes the modern majority.

Henry Preserved Smith (1899)

The International Critical Commentary of Henry Preserved Smith states it in a sentence: "Elhanan ben Jair the Bethlehemite slew Goliath the Gittite; the harmonistic purpose of the Chronicler in making the victim the brother of Goliath is evident."¹³ He even reads the difficulty back onto 1 Samuel 17, noting that Elhanan's deed "would weigh somewhat against the present form of that narrative."

P. Kyle McCarter (1984)

The Anchor Bible commentary of P. Kyle McCarter carries the Samuel-is-primary line to its strongest form. The Chronicler's "'Laḥmi, the brother of Goliath'" is "a scribal error with the effect of harmonizing this notice with I Samuel 17"; and beyond the text, "there is no doubt that the tradition attributing the slaying of Goliath to Elhanan is older than that which credits the deed to David," the contradiction "eliminated in the targumic and midrashic literature by identifying David with Elhanan."¹⁴ On this reading the champion of 1 Samuel 17 was originally anonymous, and "Goliath" was drawn into that story from Elhanan's older notice.

Michael S. Heiser (2014)

Michael S. Heiser presents the crux to a popular audience as ordinary scribal transmission, not contradiction: "somewhere along the chain of copying… one scribe made a mistake in 2 Sam 21:19," so that the verse is "a defective reading… the result of a scribe's sincere effort to cope with a problematic manuscript," resolved by 1 Chronicles 20:5.¹⁵ He sides with the toward-Chronicles direction — but, unlike the ancient harmonizers, grants that the Masoretic verse is genuinely in error, defending Scripture through the doctrine of transmission rather than by denying the fault.

Kaspars Ozoliņš (2022)

The most careful recent treatment, by Tyndale House's Kaspars Ozoliņš, resists both tidy camps. Laying out three possibilities, he judges the most plausible reconstruction to be that "Elhanan the Bethlehemite actually killed the brother of Goliath, who himself was left unnamed" — both texts descending from a shared original that each branch garbled, "Lahmi" being not a real name but a scribal slip for "the Bethlehemite" — while stressing that "we are still left with uncertainty" and that "scribes copying the Hebrew Bible rarely made deliberate changes to their text."¹⁶ He closes the timeline as its most explicit voice for a measured uncertainty over any slogan for "David, full stop" or "Elhanan did it."

Arguments

The sub-claims that cut across the timeline — turning on the direction of the corruption rather than sitting at one date — are weighed adversarially on their own pages, each with an assessment of the reading it serves. The one point none of the witnesses disputes — that the Masoretic 2 Samuel 21:19 has been changed in copying — is the doctrine's settled floor; what is genuinely contested is which way the change ran. (A third reading stands apart from that question of direction: the ancient harmonizers' claim that Elhanan simply is David, per the Targum, Rashi, and pseudo-Jerome — the crux's earliest resolution, weighed as a standalone argument below.)

Related arguments — the direction of the corruption

Everyone grants that the Masoretic 2 Samuel 21:19 was damaged in copying; the two readings below are mirror images that disagree only on which way the error ran — and so on who really killed Goliath. Each is contested, and each is the other's strongest rival, so they are best read together.

Is 2 Samuel 21:19 a scribal corruption, its original naming Goliath's brother? (assessment: contested)

David keeps the kill; 2 Samuel 21:19 is corrupt — the reading that preserves the traditional narrative: David remains the sole slayer of 1 Samuel 17's Goliath, and the Elhanan of 2 Samuel 21:19 killed a different giant — Goliath's brother — so the verse that seems to make him kill "Goliath" is a copyist's error, recoverable with the help of 1 Chronicles 20:5 ("Elhanan… struck down Lahmi the brother of Goliath"). The interpretation is contested. On its best form — Ozoliņš's, where both texts descend from a shared original in which Elhanan slew Goliath's unnamed brother, each branch then garbling it — it is coherent, economical, and arguably the most probable single account of all three texts, without having to treat Chronicles as flawless. But it is genuinely disputed: the mainstream critical judgment reads Chronicles' "brother of Goliath" as the Chronicler's own harmonization and Samuel as the harder, prior text (Driver, H. P. Smith), which points the opposite way. What must be flagged as overreach is the popular "1 Chronicles is the pristine original, so correct Samuel from it" form (Heiser, Keil & Delitzsch): the reading survives without it, but not as a text one can simply lift off the page of Chronicles.¹⁷

Was Elhanan the original slayer of Goliath, the deed later transferred to David? (assessment: contested)

Elhanan was the original slayer; David a later attribution — the mirror image of the reading above, and the mainstream critical reconstruction. It grants the same shared floor but runs the corruption the other way: 2 Samuel 21:19 is the harder, prior text and 1 Chronicles 20:5 the Chronicler's harmonization — and beyond the text, the giant's slaying was originally Elhanan's deed (the Bethlehemite of the Thirty, McCarter; Elhanan ben Dodo, Halpern), the champion of 1 Samuel 17 originally anonymous, and the credit only later drawn to the famous David. The interpretation is contested. Two claims must be kept apart: the textual half — Samuel prior, Chronicles a harmonization (Wellhausen, Driver, H. P. Smith) — is well-grounded and widely held; but the historical-transfer claim riding on it is a redaction-critical inference no manuscript attests (the Dead Sea Samuel scroll breaks off at exactly this verse), it presupposes a contested late-legend reading of 1 Samuel 17, and the very same textual data are equally explained by the brother-of-Goliath reconstruction above — on which there is no contradiction to transfer at all.¹⁸

Is "Elhanan" in 2 Samuel 21:19 simply another name for David himself? (assessment: weak)

Elhanan simply is David — the crux's earliest resolution, and the one that stands apart from the question of direction. It dissolves the contradiction not by emending either text but by declaring the Elhanan of 2 Samuel 21:19 to be David under another name, so that the verse restates 1 Samuel 17 rather than competing with it; the strange patronymic "Jaare-oregim the Bethlehemite" becomes a bundle of epithets for David (the Targum's "weaver of the curtains of the sanctuary," Rashi's flat "Elhanan — David," pseudo-Jerome's "Adeodatus is David himself"). The interpretation is weak. Steelmanned past the Targum's midrashic wordplay — on the real biblical pattern of a personal name beside a throne name (Gideon/Jerubbaal, Solomon/Jedidiah) — it is still an equation no text makes: nothing anywhere calls David "Elhanan," 2 Samuel 23:24 already lists a separate "Elhanan… of Bethlehem" among David's Thirty, and the killing here is set at Gob among David's later wars, not the youthful duel in the Valley of Elah. Even Radak, transmitting it, admitted he could not say why David would be called Elhanan. Its historical weight is real — it is the first recorded answer to the crux — but for the conservative aim of keeping David the slayer it is dominated by the scribal-correction reading, which secures that without collapsing two men into one.¹⁹

Sources