1 Samuel17chapter 17

1 Samuel 17:1-2

The Philistines have pushed twelve miles into Judah's own hill country, and the name of their camp ground, Ephes-dammim, means boundary of blood. Israel answers from the valley of Elah, the terebinth valley, on ground a visitor can still walk today. The war of this chapter is fought inside the tribe that Goliath's own city was left to trouble, for Joshua 11:22 had said the Anakim remained only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod.

1 Samuel 17:3

Two armies hold two mountainsides with the valley floor between, and neither will cross. Surveyors of the Elah valley describe a deep ravine down its middle with vertical sides and a bed strewn with water-worn stones, a valley within the valley, which explains both the long stalemate and where David's stones came from.

1 Samuel 17:4-5

Goliath comes from Gath, one of the three towns where Joshua left a remnant of the Anakim, and the founder's thread runs through him from Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33 to the four more giants of 2 Samuel 21. His height is given two ways in the witnesses: the Hebrew text reads six cubits and a span, about nine feet nine inches, while the Septuagint, a Samuel scroll from Qumran and Josephus read four cubits and a span, about six feet nine. Either way the coat of mail alone weighs five thousand shekels, near a hundred and twenty-five pounds, and the man wearing it has ruled this valley for forty days.

1 Samuel 17:6-7

The armor is described piece by piece, brass at every point a stone might land, and a shield-bearer walks in front of the whole. A spear shaft like a weaver's beam and a spearhead of six hundred shekels of iron mark him as a one-man siege engine. The narrator spends more words on this equipment than on any suit of armor in Scripture, so that its uselessness in verse 50 lands with full weight.

1 Samuel 17:8-9

Goliath proposes representative combat: one man from each side, and the losing nation serves the winner. The proposal frames the whole chapter, because whoever fights him fights for all Israel, and his victory or fall is counted to the people he stands for. Gill observes that the Philistines never honored the terms after their champion fell, which is what such offers were worth.

1 Samuel 17:10-11

The word rendered defy means to reproach, and it becomes the chapter's refrain: David will pick it up at verse 26 and answer it at verse 45. Saul and all Israel are dismayed and greatly afraid, and the reader knows why the one man tall enough to answer a giant will not go: the Spirit of the LORD departed from him in the previous chapter, at 16:14. Henry notes that the Saul of chapter 11 would have answered this challenge before nightfall.

1 Samuel 17:12-15

The narrative starts over from Bethlehem, as if to say that the answer to Gath was already growing in Ruth's town. David is the eighth son, keeper of the sheep, and verse 15 has him going back and forth between Saul's court and his father's flock, which is how the anointed of chapter 16 can arrive at this battle as an errand boy. Bethlehem carries the thread that began at Ruth 4:17 and runs to Micah 5:2.

1 Samuel 17:16

Morning and evening for forty days the reproach is renewed, and no man in Israel moves. Forty is Scripture's number of testing, the days of the spies and the years of the wilderness, and here it measures how long a nation can hear its God defied while its king stands silent.

1 Samuel 17:17-19

Jesse sends bread to his sons and cheeses to their captain, and asks for their pledge, some token that they are alive and well. The father sends the youngest to the battle with provisions for the brethren, and the older writers loved the picture without forcing it: the errand is ordinary, and providence rides on it.

1 Samuel 17:20-22

David leaves the sheep with a keeper, a detail the narrator did not owe us, and it answers Eliab's sneer at verse 28 before it is spoken. He arrives at the moment both armies shout for battle, timing no one planned but God. Henry reads the diligence itself as the lesson: the man faithful with a few sheep and a baggage errand is the one standing in the right place when the kingdom needs him.

1 Samuel 17:23-24

David hears with fresh ears what Israel has heard eighty times, and the men around him flee at the sight of the man. The contrast is the point: the army sees a giant and measures itself against him, and David hears a reproach and measures it against God.

1 Samuel 17:25-27

Saul has posted a price: riches, his daughter, and a father's house free in Israel. David's question at verse 26 turns the camp's vocabulary inside out in one sentence, for the soldiers say this man and he says this uncircumcised Philistine, and the armies of Israel become the armies of the living God. It is the first theological sentence spoken in the chapter, and it comes from the youngest man in it.

1 Samuel 17:28-30

Eliab is the brother Samuel looked on at 16:6 and heard the first correction of Scripture's new title, for the LORD seeth not as man seeth. Now the rejected eldest accuses the chosen youngest of pride and naughtiness of heart, the very organ God had just said he had examined. David's answer, Is there not a cause, and his turning to another rather than quarreling, is the chapter's quiet middle: he will not fight Eliab, only Goliath.

1 Samuel 17:31-33

David's words travel up the chain of command because no one else in the camp is saying anything like them. Saul's objection is arithmetic, thou art but a youth, and he a man of war from his youth, and by the camp's arithmetic Saul is right. The chapter is built to show that the camp's arithmetic is the wrong ledger.

1 Samuel 17:34-37

David's argument is testimony, not bravado: the LORD that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine. Past deliverance is the ground of present faith, and the shepherd's unseen faithfulness in the wilderness turns out to have been the training of a king. Saul's blessing, Go, and the LORD be with thee, gives official leave with words whose weight Saul himself no longer carries.

1 Samuel 17:38-39

Saul dresses David in the king's own armor, the only way Saul knows to fight a giant, and David puts it off with a workman's reason: I have not proved them. The scene carries its own argument, for Saul's way of meeting Goliath is Goliath's way, brass against brass, and it has kept him on his own mountainside for forty days. David goes with what God has proved in his hand.

1 Samuel 17:40

The text counts the stones and never says why five, and one was enough. A widely taught modern connection points to the four kinsmen of Goliath born to the giant in Gath at 2 Samuel 21:22, one stone for the champion and one for each of his house; Chuck Missler taught it in Return of the Nephilim. That arithmetic is the teacher's and not the narrator's, and the page says so.

1 Samuel 17:41-44

Goliath sees a boy with a stick and takes the staff for the weapon, never reckoning the sling, and he curses David by his gods, which makes the duel formally a contest of deities. His taunt, I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, is the exact sentence David will hand back to him at verse 46, enlarged from one body to the carcases of the host. The mockery is recorded at length because the reversal is measured against it.

1 Samuel 17:45-47

in the name of the Lord of hosts: The title the LORD of hosts entered Scripture at 1:3 in this same book, and here David gives it its battle sense: the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied. The aims are stated in widening circles, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that this assembly shall know that the LORD saveth not with sword and spear. The sentence the battle is the LORD's occurs nowhere else in Scripture, and it is spoken by the man with no sword.

1 Samuel 17:48-49

David runs toward the one thing all Israel has run from, and the stone sinks into the forehead, the one unarmored inch the narrator's long inventory left exposed. The older writers read the head wound with Genesis 3:15 in view, the serpent's champion falling by a blow to the head, and that reading is tradition rather than text; Bede's commentary on Samuel carries it for the early church, and among moderns Michael Heiser argued the Rephaim line behind Goliath at book length. The text itself says a shepherd's stone ended what brass could not.

1 Samuel 17:50-51

The narrator states it as a fact worth its own clause: David prevailed with a sling and with a stone, and there was no sword in his hand. Then he takes Goliath's own sword and cuts off the giant's head with it, the enemy's weapon turned on the enemy, and the sword surfaces again at Nob in chapter 21, where David says there is none like it. The champion's death breaks the whole army's nerve, exactly as the representative terms of verse 9 promised.

1 Samuel 17:52-54

The men who fled at the sight of one man now chase an army to the gates of Ekron, for the champion's fall was counted to his people. The wounded fall by the way to Shaaraim, even unto Gath, so the rout runs through Goliath's own town. David carries the head to Jerusalem, which in that day was still a Jebusite fortress, and the commentators note the strangeness honestly: the trophy goes ahead of the king to the city he will one day take, while the armor is laid up in his tent.

1 Samuel 17:55-58

Saul's question is a real difficulty beside 16:21, where David was already his armorbearer and loved of him. The readings: Saul asks after the family rather than the face, since the victor's father's house was to be made free in Israel by his own promise at verse 25; or the intervals of his affliction had loosened his memory of a visiting harper; and some point out that the old Greek text lacks verses 12 to 31 and 55 to 58 altogether, which removes the question at the price of the verses. Keil and Delitzsch defend the Hebrew text and the family reading; the page names the positions and settles nothing.