Six cubits and a span — on the usual reckoning of a cubit, something over nine feet. Honesty requires noting that the oldest Greek version, the Jewish historian Josephus, and a Dead Sea Scroll of Samuel all read four cubits and a span — about six feet nine inches, a giant by the standards of the day but a less fantastic one. Which figure is original is debated; the KJV follows the common Hebrew text. The narrative does not depend on the exact number: the armour of verses 5-7 (a coat of mail of some 125 pounds, a spearhead of about fifteen) is described in detail precisely so the reader will feel the mismatch.

A champion — the Hebrew phrase is usually explained as the man between the two — the man who steps into the space between armies to decide a battle by single combat (vv. 8-9). Gath was one of the five Philistine cities and, by Joshua 11:22, a place where some of the Anakims remained. The narrator, who has told us that Israel's king was head and shoulders above everyone (9:2), now produces a man taller still, and Saul does not go out to meet him.

Saul and all Israel — the king who was to fight our battles (8:20) is named first among the frightened. The Spirit has departed from him (16:14), and the man who once hewed oxen in pieces and raised a nation (11:7) now sits for forty days (v. 16) while a Philistine calls for a man. The chapter is as much about Saul's paralysis as about David's courage.

Verse 16 counts the humiliation: morning and evening... forty days. Twice a day for nearly six weeks Israel heard that its God was defied and did nothing. Fear in Scripture is seldom only a feeling; it is a verdict on what one believes about God. Goliath's speech never mentions the LORD; Israel's silence suggests they had half forgotten Him too. Into that silence a shepherd will say the living God (v. 26).

David's first recorded words in the book. He asks about the reward (v. 25) — the text does not hide that — but the question that drives him is the second one: who is this... that he should defy the armies of the living God? Everyone else has heard a giant; David has heard blasphemy. Where the soldiers see the man (v. 25), he sees the reproach on the name of God. The difference in what they saw explains the difference in what they did.

The living God — against Goliath's gods (v. 43), who are not. The phrase is Joshua's at the Jordan (Joshua 3:10) and Hezekiah's against Rabshakeh (2 Kings 19:4, 16). David does not call them Saul's armies or our armies but the armies of the living God — the army has forgotten whose it is, and the shepherd reminds it. Eliab's anger (v. 28), with its sneer about those few sheep and the naughtiness of thine heart, is the first of many attacks on David from his own side; his reply, Is there not a cause?, is as good as any he will give.

Saul's objection is sensible — thou art but a youth, and he a man of war from his youth (v. 33) — and David does not answer it with bravado but with history. The lion and the bear are not boasts about his strength; the subject of the sentence is the LORD that delivered me. Past deliverances are the believer's evidence; David has a private Ebenezer (7:12) from the pasture and reasons from it to the valley. Faith for the giant is built in the field, with no one watching.

Go, and the LORD be with thee — Saul says the right words and has no faith behind them; he immediately tries to put his own armour on the boy (v. 38). It did not fit, and David had not proved it (v. 39) — he would not fight in borrowed confidence. There is a lesson in that for every believer tempted to face a battle in someone else's methods: go with what God has proved to you.

Five smooth stones — a shepherd's ordinary ammunition, smooth so that they fly true. Readers have long asked why five when one was used; the text gives no reason, and symbolic answers (one for each of Goliath's brothers, or the like) are guesses it does not support. The plainest reading is that a man going into combat takes more than one shot. Scripture's point is in the next clause: his sling was in his hand — the tool of his trade, proved on lions, against the weapons of a professional.

The sling was no toy; Judges 20:16 records Benjamite slingers who could sling stones at an hair breadth, and not miss. Yet nothing about it answers a nine-foot man in mail. The narrator wants the reader to see the staff, the bag, the brook, and to hear Goliath's contempt in verse 43 — am I a dog? — because the victory must plainly belong to the One in whose name David comes.

Goliath has cursed David by his gods (v. 43) and promised his flesh to the birds (v. 44). David answers with a creed. Three weapons are named on one side; one name on the other — the LORD of hosts, the God of armies, the title Hannah used in her vow (1:11) and the narrator used of Shiloh (1:3). To come in the name of someone is to come as his representative, under his authority; David is not a volunteer but an ambassador.

Whom thou hast defied — the whole quarrel is restated as God's. Verse 46 goes on to promise not just Goliath's head but the carcases of the host, and gives the purpose: that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel. David's speech, like Hezekiah's prayer (2 Kings 19:19), is missionary before it is military — the point of the victory is what the nations will learn from it.

Two audiences are to learn two things: all the earth that there is a God in Israel (v. 46), and all this assembly — Israel herself — that the LORD saveth not with sword and spear. The nation that asked for a king to fight its battles like the nations (8:20) is about to watch a battle won by a boy without a sword (v. 50). The text stresses the absence: there was no sword in the hand of David. Chapter 13 had counted two swords in all Israel; this victory uses none.

The battle is the LORD's — the sentence Jehoshaphat's prophet will repeat (2 Chronicles 20:15) and that every believer facing something too big has borrowed since. It is not a denial of effort — David runs toward the army (v. 48) and slings with skill — but a statement of ownership. The outcome, the glory and the cause all belong to the LORD; the stone is His, the arm is His servant's.

The narrator sums up before describing the beheading (v. 51), so that no reader can miss the point: a sling and a stone... no sword. The giant fell upon his face to the earth (v. 49), as Dagon fell before the ark (5:3-4). Goliath's own sword then finishes him — the enemy's weapon turned on the enemy, a pattern Christian readers have loved to trace to the cross, where death was undone by death.

A note of honesty: 2 Samuel 21:19 says that Elhanan... slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite, where the KJV's the brother of is supplied from 1 Chronicles 20:5; the Hebrew of Samuel there reads simply that Elhanan slew Goliath. How the two notices relate — a copying error in one text, two men of the same name, or a title borne by more than one champion — is debated, and the present study does not settle it. The account before us is clear about who stood in the valley of Elah.

Many readers stop here puzzled: Saul had sent for David by name, loved him, and made him his armourbearer (16:19-22), and now asks whose son is this youth? The question sits awkwardly, and the honest course is to say so rather than explain it away. Suggestions include: that Saul asks about the family, not the lad — the reward included making his father's house free (v. 25); that the king's troubled mind had not retained a harper; that David had grown; or that chapters 16 and 17 preserve two accounts of David's introduction set side by side. The oldest Greek manuscripts also lack verses 55-58. The reader may hold these open; none affects what the chapter teaches.

David's answer (v. 58), I am the son of thy servant Jesse the Bethlehemite, is simple and loyal — thy servant Jesse. He comes back from the field with the giant's head in his hand and introduces himself as a farmer's boy. The chapter that began with a man six cubits and a span ends with a youth who has no title but his father's name — which, by the gospel's reckoning, turns out to be the only lineage that mattered.