Goliath Was Nine Feet Tall — Unless You Ask an Older Manuscript

Everyone knows the story. A boy with a sling steps onto the field against a warrior so large that the whole Israelite army stands paralyzed. But how large, exactly? The answer depends, it turns out, on which ancient manuscript you consult. 1 Samuel 17:4 is one of the clearest cases in the Old Testament where significant textual traditions disagree — not about theology, but about a number.

Two Manuscripts, Two Heights

The Masoretic Text — the Hebrew text underlying most modern English Old Testaments — describes Goliath as “six cubits and a span” tall. A cubit measured roughly 17.5 to 18 inches (the distance from elbow to fingertip); a span added about nine more. Six cubits and a span therefore works out to approximately nine feet nine inches, or just under three meters. This is the Goliath most readers carry in their minds: a figure verging on the superhuman.

The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures produced in Alexandria beginning in the third century BCE, records a different measurement: “four cubits and a span.” That figure is approximately six feet six inches, or about two meters — still imposing by any ancient standard, closer in height to a modern NBA forward than to anything supernatural.

More significantly, the Dead Sea Scrolls share the Septuagint’s shorter figure. The manuscript 4QSamᵃ — the Samuel scroll from Cave 4 at Qumran, dating to the first century BCE — is among the oldest surviving witnesses to the Hebrew text of Samuel. It too records four cubits and a span. The agreement between the Septuagint and a Hebrew Dead Sea Scroll on this point is significant: it suggests these two traditions share a common textual ancestor that differed from what eventually became the Masoretic Text.

1QIsa — Great Isaiah Scroll, one of the best-preserved Dead Sea Scrolls, c. 125 BCE · Israel Museum, Jerusalem · CC BY 4.0 (Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library). 4QSamᵃ, which preserves the four-cubits reading of Goliath’s height, comes from the same Qumran collection. The cancellation marks visible in this scroll illustrate how carefully ancient scribes worked — and how variants could arise despite that care.

How the Variant Might Have Arisen

P. Kyle McCarter Jr., in his Anchor Bible commentary on 1 Samuel (Anchor Bible 8; Doubleday, 1980), discusses how numerical variants develop in manuscript transmission. In certain periods of ancient Hebrew script, the forms for six and four could be confused by a copyist working quickly or from a damaged exemplar. Whether the shift ran from four to six or from six to four is difficult to determine from the manuscripts alone.

A second possibility is that the Masoretic Text and the LXX–4QSamᵃ tradition reflect two genuinely independent lines of transmission, each with its own history. Emanuel Tov’s authoritative Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (3rd ed., Fortress Press, 2012) documents that the books of Samuel contain more substantial divergences between the Masoretic Text and the ancient Greek translation than almost any other book in the Hebrew Bible — differences that sometimes reflect not scribal slippage but distinct literary editions circulating in different communities.

The Scholarly Debate

The question of which number is “original” remains genuinely contested. J. Daniel Hays published two articles in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society — in 2005 and again in 2007 in response to a published critique — defending the Masoretic Text’s six-cubit figure. Hays argues that references to warriors of unusual stature in ancient Near Eastern literature provide context for taking the larger number seriously, and that the relevant portion of 4QSamᵃ is significantly damaged and partially reconstructed, which limits the certainty one can place in its reading.

McCarter and others find the shorter reading more persuasive, partly because the combined witness of the Septuagint and a Hebrew scroll is substantial evidence, and partly because numbers in heroic narratives have a general tendency to grow in transmission rather than to shrink. Neither position has definitively carried the day, and the debate is a live one in Old Testament textual studies.

What the Disagreement Does and Does Not Mean

Pastors sometimes ask whether this kind of manuscript variant undermines confidence in Scripture. The short answer is: not in the way often feared. The theological argument of 1 Samuel 17 — that David went out against Goliath “in the name of the Lord of hosts” (v. 45) while Saul’s army trembled — does not depend on whether Goliath stood six feet six or nine feet nine. The story is about the contrast between Israel’s fear and David’s faith, not about the precision of the Philistine’s measurements.

What the variant does require is honesty about what “the biblical text” means. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, Western readers knew essentially one Hebrew text — the Masoretic Text as transmitted and stabilized by medieval Jewish scholars. The Qumran scrolls revealed that earlier in the textual tradition, other Hebrew versions existed and circulated. That discovery has been one of the most consequential developments in modern biblical scholarship, and Goliath’s height is one of the places where it makes a visible difference. Acknowledging that difference is not skepticism about Scripture — it is taking the transmission history of the text seriously.

References

• P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel: A New Translation with Introduction, Notes and Commentary (Anchor Bible 8; Doubleday, 1980)
• J. Daniel Hays, “Reconsidering the Height of Goliath,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 48.4 (2005): 701–714
• J. Daniel Hays, “The Height of Goliath: A Response to Clyde Billington,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 50.3 (2007): 509–516
• Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Fortress Press, 2012)

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