DID YOU KNOW?

"The shaft of his spear was like a weaver's beam" describes Goliath in two places in Samuel. In which one does David kill him?

The answer

1 Samuel 17. There the line describes the champion David faces (17:7), and David kills him with a sling stone and then with his own sword (17:49-51). In 2 Samuel 21:19 the same words describe the Goliath that "Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim the Bethlehemite killed."

Why it’s interesting

Neither chapter explains the other, and an Elhanan of Bethlehem also appears in the lists of David's best warriors (2 Samuel 23:24; 1 Chronicles 11:26). There his father is Dodo, not Jaare-oregim. The note on that list in the New Oxford Annotated Bible points back to 2 Samuel 21:19 and reads it as Elhanan killing Goliath.

Scholarly consensus

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