Mortal · c. 1000 BCE
Goliath
Also called Goliath of Gath, The Philistine
The Philistine champion of 1 Samuel 17, and the best-known giant in any of these texts — whose height the manuscripts do not agree on, and whose death the Hebrew Bible reports twice with two different killers.
Well sourced
He is a soldier before he is a wonder. The text spends its detail on his equipment rather than on his nature: a bronze helmet, a coat of mail weighing five thousand shekels, greaves, a javelin between his shoulders, a spear whose shaft is like a weaver's beam with a head of six hundred shekels of iron, and a shield-bearer walking in front. Nothing in the account calls him a nephil, a rapha or anything but a man of Gath, which is why this corpus files him as mortal.
Two problems in the text are worth having on the page rather than smoothed away. The first is his height: the Masoretic text gives six cubits and a span, around nine feet nine, while the Dead Sea Samuel scroll, the Septuagint and Josephus all give four cubits and a span, around six feet nine — a tall man rather than a monster, and the older reading on most reckonings. The second is his death. 1 Samuel 17 gives him to David; 2 Samuel 21:19 says Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim killed Goliath the Gittite, whose spear was like a weaver's beam; and 1 Chronicles 20:5 rewrites that verse to make Elhanan's victim Lahmi, the brother of Goliath. The corpus records all three rather than choosing, because the choosing is the interesting part: Chronicles is visibly repairing a contradiction its own source left standing.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE
- Rank
- Champion of Gath
- Era
- c. 1000 BCE
- Traditions
- Christian, Jewish
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
1 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 1 offices attributed to Goliath, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial1
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Goliath, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 493 years
Where the texts differ
- Rank: given as Champion of the Philistines; Of the race of the giants
The champion of Gath who defies the ranks of Israel for forty days and is killed with a sling, 1 Samuel 17. His height is six cubits and a span in the Masoretic text and four cubits and a span in the Dead Sea Samuel scroll and the Septuagint. 2 Samuel 21:19 credits his death to Elhanan; 1 Chronicles 20:5 makes Elhanan's victim his brother Lahmi.
Josephus retells the duel and gives the height as four cubits and a span, agreeing with the Greek and the scroll against the Masoretic text — which is why the shorter reading is not a modern proposal but the older majority one.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Afterwards
What did later readers make of it?
The name became a common noun for anything oversized and about to lose, which is a fate almost no other figure in this corpus achieves. That reading owes more to the retellings than to the chapter: the text's David is not a small boy but a young man who declines armour because he is not used to it, and who wins with a weapon Philistine armies had good reason to respect.
Kept in its own section on purpose. Everything above is what the cited texts say; this is what was built on top of them afterwards, and blending the two is how most popular demonology goes wrong.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Goliath?
What rank is Goliath?
How else is Goliath spelled?
What is Goliath said to do?
How old is Goliath?
Nearest in the corpus
If Goliath is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
The Rephaim
A People, and the Dead
One word doing two jobs: a people east of the Jordan, and the shades of the dead — a double sense the Ugaritic texts already carry centuries before the Hebrew ones.
Jezebel
Queen of Israel · Canaanite
A Phoenician princess married to Ahab, who backed Baal and Asherah against the prophets of Israel. Revelation later borrows her name for a rival teacher, and it has been a label rather than a person ever since.
Nimrod
The First Mighty One
The first man the Bible calls mighty on the earth, founder of Babel, Erech and Akkad — a king in Genesis and nothing worse, who becomes a tyrant everywhere afterwards.
Og of Bashan
The Last of the Rephaim
A king east of the Jordan, described as the last remnant of the Rephaim, and evidenced in his own text by a piece of furniture — an iron bedstead nine cubits long, on display at Rabbah.
Enkidu
The Wild Man · Mesopotamian
Formed from clay to be Gilgamesh's match and made human by a week with a woman, he is the corpus's clearest statement that civilisation is a loss as well as a gain.
The Anakim
A People of Great Stature
A people of Hebron whom the scouts of the Hebrew Bible report as impossibly tall and identify with the Nephilim — inside the very report the text goes on to call false.
The books behind Goliath
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page
Antiquities of the Jews
Flavius Josephus; trans. William Whiston, 1737 · c. 93 CE · Greek
Read Antiquities of the Jews in full ↗
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.