Goliath
[1] According to the text, Goliath issued a challenge to the Israelites, daring them to send forth a champion to engage him in single combat; he was ultimately defeated by the young shepherd David, employing a sling and stone as a weapon.
[4][5] The phrase "David and Goliath" has taken on a more popular meaning denoting an underdog situation, a contest wherein a smaller, weaker opponent faces a much bigger, stronger adversary.
David puts the armor of Goliath in his own tent and takes the head to Jerusalem, and Saul sends Abner to bring the boy to him.
[10] The Goliath story is made up of base-narrative with numerous additions made probably after the exile:[11] The oldest manuscripts, namely the Dead Sea Scrolls text of Samuel from the late 1st century BCE, the 1st-century CE historian Josephus, and the major Septuagint manuscripts, all give Goliath's height as "four cubits and a span" (6 feet 9 inches or 2.06 metres), whereas the Masoretic Text has "six cubits and a span" (9 feet 9 inches or 2.97 metres).
[15] In 2 Samuel 21, verse 19, the Hebrew Bible tells how Goliath the Gittite was killed by "Elhanan the son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite".
[18] Other scholars argue the description is a trustworthy reflection of the armaments that a Philistine warrior would have worn in the tenth century BCE.
[19][C] A story very similar to that of David and Goliath appears in the Iliad, written c. 760–710 BCE, where the young Nestor fights and conquers the giant Ereuthalion.
[21][22] Each giant wields a distinctive weapon—an iron club in Ereuthalion's case, a massive bronze spear in Goliath's; each giant, clad in armor, comes out of the enemy's massed array to challenge all the warriors in the opposing army; in each case the seasoned warriors are afraid, and the challenge is taken up by a stripling, the youngest in his family (Nestor is the twelfth son of Neleus, David the seventh or eighth son of Jesse).
[23] Tell es-Safi, the biblical Gath and traditional home of Goliath, has been the subject of extensive excavations by Israel's Bar-Ilan University.
The Tell es-Safi inscription, a potsherd discovered at the site, and reliably dated to between the tenth to mid-ninth centuries BC, is inscribed with the two names ʾLWT and WLT.
[25] Aren Maeir, director of the excavation, comments: "Here we have very nice evidence [that] the name Goliath appearing in the Bible in the context of the story of David and Goliath… is not some later literary creation.
"[26] Based on the southwest Anatolian onomastic considerations, Roger D. Woodard proposed *Walwatta as a reconstruction of the form ancestral to both Hebrew Goliath and Lydian Alyattes.
[32] Called Jalut in Arabic (جالوت), Goliath's mention in the Quran is concise, although it remains a parallel to the account in the Hebrew Bible.
[33] Goliath, in early scholarly tradition, became a kind of byword or collective name for the oppressors of the Israelite nation before David.
[6][34] Theology professor Leonard Greenspoon, in his essay, "David vs. Goliath in the Sports Pages", explains that "most writers use the story for its underdog overtones (the little guy wins) ... Less likely to show up in newsprint is the contrast that was most important to the biblical authors: David's victory shows the power of his God, while Goliath's defeat reveals the weakness of the Philistine deities.
[44] Italian actor Luigi Montefiori portrayed this 9 ft 0 in (2.74 m)-tall giant in Paramount's 1985 live-action film King David as part of a flashback.
Toho and Tsuburaya Productions collaborated on a film called Daigoro vs. Goliath (1972), which follows the story relatively closely but recasts the main characters as kaiju.
[citation needed] In 2005, Lightstone Studios released a direct-to-DVD movie musical titled "One Smooth Stone", which was later changed to "David and Goliath".
