How Did David Kill Goliath?

According to some skeptics of the Bible, David killed Goliath twice: "And David put his hand into his bag and took from it a stone and slung it, and struck the Philistine on his forehead. And the stone penetrated his forehead, and he fell on his face to the ground. So David prevailed over the Philistine with the sling and the stone: he struck the Philistine and killed him, and there was no sword in David’s hand. Then David ran and stood over the Philistine, and took his sword and drew it out of its sheath and finished him, and cut off his head with it. When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled," (1 Samuel 17:49-51 NASB).

What some skeptics claim is that the first time(verses 49-50) David killed with his stone. In the second time(verse 51), it seems he killed him with a sword. To answer this objection, we are going to look at the book "Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith?: A Critical Appraisal of Modern and Postmodern Approaches to Scripture": “The alleged ‘double killing’ of the Philistine in 17:50-51 can be explained reasonably when one takes a closer look at the Hebrew text. In verse 50 a hiphil form of מוּת, ‘die,’ is collocated with ‘he struck down,’ while in verse 51 a polel form of מוּת is used to describe how David killed the Philistine with the sword. The collocation of verbs in verse 50 has the nuance ‘dealt a mortal blow.’ The polel of מוּת (v. 51) is used in eight other passages in the Old Testament. In three poetic texts, it appears to mean, simply, ‘kill, put to death’ (Pss. 34:21; 109:16; Jer. 20:17). But in narrative (all in Judges-Samuel) it appears to have a specialized shade of meaning, referring to finishing off someone who is already mortally wounded (Judg. 9:54; 1 Sam. 14:13; 2 Sam. 1:9-10, 16). Abimelech’s statement (Judg. 9:54) is particularly instructive—he asked the armor bearer to kill him (polel) because otherwise people would say that a woman killed him (the verb is הָרַג, ‘kill’). So who killed Abimelech? Two answers are possible and both are correct—the woman (she delivered a mortal blow that made death certain) and the armor bearer (he delivered the death blow in the technical sense = polel). How did David kill the Philistine? Again two answers are possible and both are correct—with a sling stone (David delivered a mortal blow with the sling that made death certain) and with the Philistine’s sword, which he used to deliver the deathblow in a technical sense," (Blomberg 195).

To simplify, the first shot was a fatal blow while the second finished Goliath off.

Works Cited:

Blomberg, Craig L., et al. Do Historical Matters Matter to Faith? A Critical Appraisal of Modern and Postmodern Approaches to Scripture. United States, Crossway, 2012.

Image by Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash

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