Who killed Goliath, David or Elhanan, and was Elhanan’s victim Goliath or his brother?

David killed Goliath; Elhanan killed Goliath’s brother Lahmi in a later war. 1 Chronicles 20:5 says so plainly, and the Hebrew of 2 Samuel 21:19 is best explained as a copyist’s slip from the same wording. Chronicles reads ‘Elhanan son of Jair [killed] et-Lahmi achi Golyat’ (‘Lahmi the brother of Goliath’); Samuel reads ‘Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim beit ha-lachmi et Golyat’ (‘the Bethlehemite … Goliath’). The letters are nearly the same: ‘et-Lahmi’ became ‘the Bethlehemite’ and ‘achi’ (‘brother of’) became ‘et’, the sign of the object, while the odd ‘oregim’ (‘weavers’) in the father’s name is the word that ends the verse (‘a weaver’s beam’), probably copied in by an eye that slipped to the line below. Keil and Delitzsch and Adam Clarke both explain the verse this way.

The ‘two killings’ are one death told in two steps. The stone struck Goliath down (17:49), and verse 50 sums up the victory: David “prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone”, with “no sword in the hand of David”. Verse 51 then tells how it was finished: David took the giant’s own sword and “slew him, and cut off his head therewith”. That sword was later kept at Nob and given to David (1 Samuel 21:9).

Elhanan was David

An old Jewish reading, found in the Targum and in Rashi as Gill reports, took Elhanan to be another name for David. Gill rejects it: this battle was at Gob, not in the valley of Elah, and David is never called Elhanan.

Two Goliaths

Some suggest that Goliath was a family name, or that two giants bore it. Keil and Delitzsch thought this very unlikely, since Chronicles names the second man as Goliath’s brother.

Some scholars, such as Bertheau and Böttcher in Keil’s day, have argued the reverse: that Samuel keeps the original wording and Chronicles altered it. Keil replied that the Chronicler is nowhere shown to falsify his sources, and conservative scholars generally follow Chronicles.