WHO KILLED GOLIATH?
by
Joe Deweese
And there was again war with the
Philistines at
Gob; and Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim the
Beth-lehemite
slew Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear
was like
a weaver s beam (2 Samuel 21:19).
And there was again war with the Philistines;
and
Elhanan the son of Jair slew Lahmi the brother of
Goliath
the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a
weavers
beam (1 Chronicles 20:5).
The record of David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17)
clearly
speaks of the defeat of the giant of Gath by the
shepherd boy.
This story is used to emphasize faith and faithfulness
to the
young from their earliest ages. However, some have
alleged a
discrepancy between the account in 1 Samuel and two
other
passages (2 Samuel 21:19 and 1 Chronicles 20:5).
According to
2 Samuel 21:19, it appears that Elhanan killed Goliah;
yet 1
Chronicles 20:5 states that Elhanan killed Lahmi the
brother of Goliath. The question, then, is who
did
Elhanan kill?
First, we must recognize who Elhanan was
not.
According to 1 Chronicles 20:5, Elhanan was the son of
Jair.
This was not the same man as Elhanan the Bethlehemite,
son of
Dodo (2 Samuel 23:24; Keil and Delitzsch, 1996,
2:681).
Furthermore, it appears that Jair and Jaareoregim
actually are
the same person (Barnes, 1998, 2:120). Barnes, as well
as the
editors of The Pulpit Commentary, noted that
the
difficulty may have begun when oregim, the
Hebrew word
translatedweaver in this passage, ended up
being placed on
the wrong line by a copyist=97something that has been
known to
happen in several instances (see Spence and Exell,
1978,
4:514). Therefore, Jair, combined with oregim,
became
Jaare-oregim in order to make it fit with
proper Hebrew
grammar (Spence and Exell, 4:514).
Second, the phraseLahmi the brother of is
absent in 2
Samuel 21:19. The King James Version inserts the
phrasethe
brother of betweenBethlehemite and
Goliath.
Furthermore, in the Hebrew, eth Lachmi (a
combination
ofLahmi and the termbrother) appears to
have been
changed into beith hallachmi (Beth- lehemite).
With
this simple correction, the two texts would be in
clear
agreement (Clarke, n.d., p. 369). In other words,
the brother
of and the nameLahmi likely were combined by
a copyist to
form what is translated in English as
Beth-lehemite in 2
Samuel 21:19. This, however, caused the difficulty
when the
passage was paralleled with 1 Chronicles 20:5.
In his Encyclopedia of Bible
Difficulties,
Gleason Archer used the same scenario mentioned
above to
explain this difficulty, and then summed up the
situation by
noting:In other words, the 2 Samuel 21 passage is
a
perfectly traceable corruption of the original
wording, which
fortunately has been correctly preserved in 1
Chronicles 20:5
(1982, p. 179). A fair, in-depth examination of the
alleged
difficulty shows that there actually is no
contradiction at
all, but simply a copyistss mistake.
REFERENCES
Archer, Gleason L. (1982), Encyclopedia of Bible
Difficulties (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan).
Barnes, Albert (1998 reprint), Barness Notes:
Exodus to
Esther (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker).
Clarke, Adam (no date), Commentary and Critical
Notes on
the Old Testament: Joshua to Esther (New York, NY:
Abingdon).
Keil, C.F., and F. Delitzsch (1996), Commentary
on the
Old Testament: Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2
Samuel
(Peabody, MA: Hendrickson).
Spence, H.D.M., and Joseph S. Exell, Eds. (1978),
The
Pulpit Commentary: Ruth, I & II Samuel (Grand
Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans).
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