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

One proposal concerns copying: Hays suggests that the “six hundred” in verse 7 may have influenced the numeral in verse 4. This is a reconstruction of how the difference could have arisen, not an observed copying event.

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

J. Daniel Hays argues in his 2005 article for four cubits and a span as the most likely original reading. His 2007 article responds to Clyde Billington. Describing Hays as a defender of the six-cubit reading reverses his stated conclusion. Read the 2005 conclusion.

That textual judgment does not measure a historical person. Manuscript readings, arguments about priority, and conversion of ancient units into modern measurements remain different questions.

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. The shorter reading in Greek witnesses and Josephus was known before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. The scrolls supplied an early Hebrew witness as well. 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.

The giant in a Renaissance household

Pesellino’s The Story of David and Goliath (about 1445–55) places successive actions in a single landscape. The National Gallery connects the paired panels with marriage decoration, possibly for a Medici patron. The biblical story thus entered a domestic setting in Renaissance Florence. Collection entry.

A painting organizes contrasts between the shepherd and his armed opponent; it does not measure the historical warrior. Manuscripts and paintings answer different questions: what wording was transmitted, and how a later community imagined the story. Reading both prevents the familiar visual giant from silently deciding a textual question.

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)

Comments

Loading comments…

Leave a comment

Comments are reviewed before being published. Only your name and comment are stored — no personal data collected.

Name (required)Write a comment (max 1,000 characters)

Submit comment