Who killed Goliath? The Different Textual Traditions

Who killed Goliath? (a) David (1 Samuel 17:23 - 50). (b) Elhanan (2 Samuel 21:19). Like many passages throughout the Hebrew Bible, there are different textual traditions that present different details, and in fact, a different story. According to 1 Samuel 17:49-50, David killed Goliath in his youth, many years before he became the king of a united monarchy. According to 2 Samuel 21:19, Elhanan killed Goliath several years after David became the king of Judah and Israel. A few points to make here: 1) Some apologists try to say that Goliath of Gath and Goliath the Gittite were different people (one passage mentions Goliath the Gittite). The notes in the Jewish Study Bible - and in a good concordance and lexicon - beg to differ. Goliath the Gittite was the Goliath of Gath. Gittite actually means, "belonging to Gath", or an inhabitant of Gath. 2) Some sneaky translations have added "the brother of Goliath" in 2 Samuel 21:19, rather than Goliath, in order to try to make these align. But Bibles with good footnotes will indicate that "the brother of" is not there in the Hebrew source texts. In the Hebrew it says Goliath. The same can be confirmed with Strong's Concordance, or a good Lexicon, or a good study Bible. There is also a specific note on this in the New Oxford Annotated and Jewish Study Bible indicating that the 1 Samuel story is an elaboration and re-working of the story. These are two different traditions about who killed Goliath. Scholars believe that the story in its earlier forms were about Elhanan, then later changed to be about David, the great hero of Israel. This is indicated by scholars in both of those study Bibles I mentioned. It's because of research like this that many Evangelicals love to scoff at scholars like they are just making things up - forgetting that they wouldn't even have a Bible to read without the work of scholars, and that OT scholars have PhD's in the languages and cultures of the ancient near east.....they spend their lives studying this material at depths the average person cannot comprehend...and in languages we can't read. Also, most biblical scholars are people of faith, so it's not like they are trying to de-convert everyone. They are simply committed to real scholarship.

Regardless, it's a textual contradiction. These are different textual traditions. (See more resources below that go into further detail.) 3) The writers of 1 Chronicles did the same thing....which is prob why some translators took the liberty with 2 Sam 21:19. 1 Chron 20:5 says Elhanan killed Lahmi the brother of Goliath, rather than Goliath. And it says that in the Hebrew, which is a total contradiction of the Hebrew in 2 Sam 21. The notes in both the Jewish Study Bible and the Oxford Annotated explain how the writers of 1 Chron were attempting to harmonize the different, conflicting traditions. But the conflict is there regardless. (There are many conflicting traditions between 1 & 2 Chronicles and the stories of 1 & 2 Kings and 1 & 2 Sam. See more on this below.)

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Scholarly resources for more detail: The New Oxford Annotated 5th Edition

https://www.amazon.com/New-Oxford-Annotated-Bible-Apocrypha-ebook-dp-B07C52T45T/dp/B07C52T45T/ref=mt_kindle?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=

The Jewish Study Bible 2nd Edition

https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Study-Bible-Second-ebook/dp/B00OKPCRLG/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1538003613&sr=1-1&keywords=jewish+study+bible

King David - Different Textual Traditions and Greek Influence (see footnotes in article for more references)

https://www.thetorah.com/article/king-david-and-oedipus-rex

The Different Textual Traditions of the Hebrew Bible

http://contradictionsinthebible.com/how-the-bible-was-discovered-to-be-a-collection-of-contradictory-texts/

Chronicles - Updating or Replacing the books of Samuel and Kings (see footnotes in article for more references) https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Chronicles,_Books_of 1 & 2 Samuel - Background, Composition, Sources (also a quick reference to the 2 different accounts of who killed Goliath) http://www.oxfordbiblicalstudies.com/article/opr/t280/e129 Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries: I & II Chronicles: I and II Chronicles https://books.google.com/books?id=s3weTW7ylToC&q=goliath#v=snippet&q=goliath&f=false (Or on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=9780687007509&i=stripbooks&linkCode=qs)