The story of David and Goliath has become a byword in Western culture for any struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds. It has also inspired one of the most sublime works of art in human history, Michelangelo’s David. David’s worried face clearly expresses his consternation at facing off against the giant Philistine.
But just how tall was Goliath, really?
On the face of it, the Biblical account is clear: “six cubits and a span”. Other ancient text says “four cubits and a span”. Many biblical scholars prefer the “four cubits and a span” as the most likely measure.
The only problem is “cubit” and “span” were not exactly consistent units. A cubit is the distance measured from the tip of the middle finger to the bottom of the elbow; a span is the distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger, generally considered to be half a cubit.
As long as a piece of string, in other words.
An archaeologist claims to have measured this particular piece of string – and it’s not as long (or tall, to be precise) as you might think.
Goliath may have a towering place in biblical history, but the Philistine warrior described as a giant may not actually have been that tall, according to new research by Prof. Jeff Chadwick of Brigham Young University’s Jerusalem Center of Archaeology and Near Eastern Studies[…]It shows that while it is possible that Goliath was quite tall and may even have dwarfed most of his contemporaries, he was still a normal-sized person, at least by today’s standards.
Chadwick is an archaeologist who has spent 20 years with the Tell es-Safi/Gath Archaeological Project, based at the ancient city of Gath in Israel. Chadwick has spent seven years attempting to quantify such ancient metrics as cubits and spans in ancient Israel.
Since 2013, Chadwick has conducted research on the ancient measurements known as the cubit and the span as part of an extensive project on ancient measurements in general. Visiting dozens of archaeological sites in Israel, and measuring hundreds of different architectural features in their excavated remains, Chadwick has identified the length of the ancient cubit as 54 centimeters, and the length of the ancient span as 22 centimeters[…]
Chadwick noted that the height metric for Goliath found in 1 Samuel 17:4 is absolutely unique – no other person’s height is reported in specific metrics in the entire Hebrew Bible. For example, while King Saul is noted as being head-and-shoulders taller than other Israelite men (1 Samuel 9:2), there is no specific measure given for his height. Chadwick wondered why a precise measurement for the Philistine champion’s height was reported.
The decisive clue for the exact measure comes from the ruins of Gath itself.
Given that “four cubits and a span” (2.38 meters) has been determined to be the thickness of Gath’s city wall, in the very era that Goliath is supposed to have lived (the horizon of late Iron Age I or early Iron Age II), Chadwick proposed that the Hebrew Bible author (probably the so-called Deuteronomist of the late seventh century BCE) metaphorically rendered the extraordinary size of Goliath by describing him as being as tall as the width of his city’s wall.
“It seems like an appropriate literary device, to characterize Goliath as being as big as a city wall” Chadwick said.
We might tend to think of 2.38 metres as just “very tall”, rather than the giant of the Bible legend, but that’s partly a mistake based on modern prejudices.
He added that he was not claiming Goliath was not the giant described by the Bible, only that the very tall height given for the Philistine is probably not a literal height but a comparative measure. A person standing 2.38 meters (7 feet 9½ inches), or even something near that, would be extremely tall even today. In the Iron Age, an average man’s height was reportedly in between five feet and five foot three. The tallest three American basketball players in the NBA of recent memory – Shawn Bradley, Yao Ming, and Manute Bol – stood 7 feet 6 inches (2.286 m.) tall. So the report of Goliath’s height would remain quite impressive, even if it were in reality a metaphoric comparison to the thickness of his city’s wall.
The Jerusalem Post
As Chadwick says, this does not establish firmly, one way or the other, the veracity of the David and Goliath story, or whether Goliath was an historic person. What it does do, however, is clarify exactly how tall the legendary Philistine warrior really was.
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