CONTRADICTIONS: Did David Kill Goliath Twice?
(FIVE-MINUTE READ) — Everybody knows at least the general outlines of the Old Testament story of David killing the giant Philistine warrior, Goliath, with nothing more than a sling and a smooth stone, right?
That’s why atheist critics of the Bible often point to two verses in Samuel that seem to indicate that David actually killed Goliath twice.
“Aha! See!!! The Bible can’t be the inspired, true word of God because here’s the prophet Samuel claiming in successive verses that David killed Goliath by hitting him in the forehead with a stone and that David killed Goliath with his own sword.”
Here’s the key passage in I Samuel 17:48-51:
“When the Philistine arose and came and drew near to meet David, David ran quickly toward the battle line to meet the Philistine. And David put his hand in his bag and took out a stone and slung it and struck the Philistine on his forehead. The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the ground.
“So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and struck the Philistine and killed him. There was no sword in the hand of David. Then David ran and stood over the Philistine and took his sword and drew it out of its sheath and killed him and cut off his head with it. When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled.”
So, did David kill the mighty Philistine giant with his sling and a smooth stone or with Goliath’s own sword? Or why does Samuel seem to indicate that David killed Goliath twice, once with his sling and stone, and a second time with Goliath’s sword?
On its face, this appears to be a clear example of a contradiction in Scripture and one that raises a legitimate doubt about what Samuel wrote was actually inspired by God or Samuel let his creative writing juices go a little to far.
There are two fundamental points to be considered here. First, according to the Apologetics Press’s Eric Lyons, in the third of his three volumes “The Anvil Rings,” it’s highly unlikely that any sentient individual writer is going to purposely contradict himself in consecutive sentences.
“Second, we need to keep in mind that there are many specific questions that Bible students cannot answer about things mentioned in Scripture,” Lyons points out. “For example, God created light without the Sun on day one of Creation, but we are uninformed about the nature of that light.”
Lyons then reminds us that I Samuel “could easily be indicating that David struck Goliath with an initial, unrecoverable blow to the forehead, and then quickly finished him off via decapitation.”
If that sounds like a rationalization, remember that we often hear of people killed in car accidents when in fact they didn’t pass away until on the way to the hospital or a fews later in the hospital. Do we say the hospital killed that person? No, we typically say they were killed as a result of a crash.
Lyons closes by pointing out that “it seems equally unjust to accuse the Bible of a contradiction for using words and phrases in ways not all that different from how we truthfully, understandably and defensibly use them in 21st Century America.
“Why can’t we be as fair with Scripture as we are with each other? David dealt a crushing blow to Goliath with a sling and a stone, and then finished him off with the giant’s own sword.”