Weird Stuff in the Bible

How Was Goliath So Tall?
I Samuel 17

Introduction
I am on a bit of a David-and-Goliath kick right now, for three reasons.
One, because I just got back from vacation where I saw an incredible production of David’s life at Sight and Sound theater.
Two, there’s an amazing new show on Amazon called House of David that I just finished watching.
And three, because the story of David and Goliath is a picture of the spiritual battle we all find ourselves in every day.
Now, even if you aren’t a Christian, you know the story of David and Goliath. The small Israelite boy who used a sling to destroy the giant champion of the Philistines.
But when we say Goliath was a giant, what do we mean? Well, I Samuel 17 says he was six cubits and a span. I have enough trouble converting English to Metric, and my yardsticks growing up did NOT have an edge that measured cubits and spans.
Scholars will tell us that six cubits and a span amounts to anywhere from 9-foot-9 to 10-foot-6.
And yet those same scholars will tell us in the next breath that this must be some kind of mistake, because obviously, nobody can be 10 feet tall. Even Christian scholars will teach that this must be some kind of typo in the Bible.
Well, call me old-fashioned, or call me a fundamentalist, but I believe that the whole Bible is God’s Word, and that God doesn’t make mistakes.
So I take this to be literal truth. But I also take it to be weird.
And I’d like to explore why it’s in the Bible.
Turn to I Samuel 17, and let’s get weird.
[theme music]

Goliath’s origins
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be talking about how Goliath got so tall.
So let’s start with where we meet Goliath, and then we’re going to trace his family line backwards to understand where he came from.
Goliath is said to be approximately 10 feet tall; like I said before, some say 10 foot 6.
Now, the tallest person we have on human record- ever since they started keeping track in the past few hundred years- was 8 foot 11. Robert Wadlow. And he was a tall lanky guy, certainly no beast of a man like Goliath was. So Goliath was more than a foot taller than even the tallest guy we have on record.
Now as I said, some take Goliath’s height to be a typo; some say it must have actually been more like 6 foot 6. And since the average male height was closer to 5 feet for those people and that culture, then someone who was 6’6” would be seen as a giant.
However, if we take the typo explanation, that still doesn’t account for Goliath’s great strength.
I Samuel 17:4-7 say
4 And there came out from the camp of the Philistines a champion named Goliath of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span. 5 He had a helmet of bronze on his head, and he was armed with a coat of mail, and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of bronze. 6 And he had bronze armor on his legs, and a javelin of bronze slung between his shoulders. 7 The shaft of his spear was like a weaver's beam, and his spear's head weighed six hundred shekels of iron. And his shield-bearer went before him.
With a spear head of that size, Goliath’s spear is estimated to be about 12.7 feet long. Now, if Goliath were just 6 foot 6, a spear twice his height would be quite impractical. So that would have to be a typo as well, right?
And his armor of 5,000 shekels would equate to about 125 pounds in modern times. Now, I’m not sure if that sounds like a lot, but in comparison, the average armor in those days was 20 to 40 pounds. So for most men, 125 pounds worth of armor would have been impossible to wear into battle. I was at the gym today and out of curiosity, I tried lifting 125 pounds, and I did not like it.
So Goliath’s armor covering and his strength was at least 3 times that of an average man. If you think of one of the knights of medieval times and how armored up they were, a full suit of armor in those days was about 50 pounds. Again, Goliath’s armor was about 125 pounds.
So was that a typo as well, or is the Bible truly saying that Goliath was a really really really big guy? He was a really really really big guy. A strong guy. Superhumanly big and strong.
So like I said: the largest guy we have on record was less than 9 feet tall. And that’s in modern times with billions and billions of humans to use as our sample size. Robert Wadlow is dead. The tallest currently living man is Sultam Kaseem at 8 foot 3 inches. So how did this random guy Goliath from thousands of years ago when there were way less people on the earth get so much bigger than any modern humans?
Well, let’s start by analyzing where Goliath came from. Because it’s actually not so random once you understand his origins.
Let me re-read verse 4
And there came out from the camp of the Philistines a champion named Goliath of Gath
Goliath was from a city called Gath. What was Gath? Gath was one of the five cities of the Philistines. Those cities were Gath, Ekron, Ashdod, Ashkelon and Gaza. Yes, Gaza, the same place you hear about today that sent those terrorists into Israel 18 months ago and slaughtered a bunch of Jewish people. The Israelites and Gazans have been in conflict for thousands of years.
Why? Side note here but once you understand about demonic strongholds and territorial spirits, we understand why this conflict doesn’t end. I believe it can’t end until Israel doesn’t just defeat the terrorists in Gaza, but also cleanses the land of its idols and altars. Until it does that, it doesn’t matter how badly they defeat Gaza; the same spirits will have a foothold in that region until the altars are destroyed. The same terrorists will come back and afflict Israel again later on because the principalities over that region have not been displaced.
Now, that’s perhaps speculative, but I say that based on what I’ve been studying this year about spiritual gates and altars. So we’ll leave that as a side-note for now and continue studying Goliath here.
So Gath is one of the five Philistine cities. Now let’s talk about the inhabitants of Gath. We’re gonna hop in a Delorean and go back in time a few hundred years to the time of Joshua. His book talks about the exploits of the Israelites as they took the Promised Land, the land of Israel, and it talks about how they drove out these peoples called the Anakim.
Joshua 11:20-21 say
21 And at that time Joshua came and cut off the Anakim from the mountains: from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, from all the mountains of Judah, and from all the mountains of Israel; Joshua utterly destroyed them with their cities. 22 None of the Anakim were left in the land of the children of Israel; they remained only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod.
So the Anakim had been driven into Gath, the city where Goliath came from. That is so important, I’m gonna say it twice: the Anakim had been driven into Gath.
Now let’s talk about where the Anakim came from.

The Origins of the Anakim
Back to the Delorean. If we go back just one generation to the book of Numbers, it contains the story where God first told the Israelites to go in and take the Promised Land. If you know the story, you know that the Israelites chickened out of doing this the first time around.
Now, before we judge the Israelites unfairly, let’s consider what they were looking at as they considered fighting it out for the Promised Land. When the spies came back from scouting out the land, this is what they said in
Numbers 13:33 (NIV)
We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak came from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.
So it said that they saw the Nephilim. Other translations might say “giants.” Means essentially the same thing. They saw giants in the land. There were some beings of superhuman size and strength who littered the Promised Land.
Now, when it says “we seemed like grasshoppers” right there, was that an exaggeration? Perhaps it was an exaggeration in a literal sense. I mean, a human is approximately 25 to 35 times taller than a grasshoppers, according to an AI chatbot that I just asked. I do not believe that the giants of Numbers 13:33 were 25x taller than the Israelites. So I don’t think this statement is literally true.
However, I also don’t believe they were just a mere six inches taller. I believe these were giants like Goliath; that they were 10, 12, perhaps 13 feet tall- maybe more. I believe these giants were probably about twice as tall as the Israelites themselves.
So I don’t think it was as much of an exaggeration as we might think when we read the Israelites’ words. These giants would have been intimidating to any of us. I’m not giving the Israelites a pass, and God didn’t, either. We’ll talk about this more at the end, but God’s opinion on the giants was that they were very beatable, that He would enable the Israelites to topple these giants, they just had to have faith. Not faith in themselves, but faith in God to work through them to accomplish the task that He set before them to do.
But yes, they were literal giants. I don’t believe Goliath was just a one-and-done unique dude who just happened to be really tall. I believe there was an entire race of people in those days who lived among the Canaanites and the Philistines, and they were called the Anakim. They were the descendants of Anak.
Note again what verse 33 said: the descendants of Anak came from the Nephilim
So what are Nephilim? Most listeners of this podcast probably already know, but let me just catch you up real quick in case you don’t. By the way, this is probably the weirdest thing I believe, the weirdest thing I talk about on this podcast, and despite the fact that I talk about it in several episodes, I have not lost sight of the fact that this is a really strange thing that the Bible tells us about. So I’m self-aware of how crazy this sounds, if you haven’t heard it before.

The Origin of the Nephilim
A long long time ago, in ancient biblical times, there were these spiritual beings called the Sons of God who created the giants, or the Nephilim. This is discussed in Genesis 6. The Sons of God are spiritual beings who were tasked with watching over mankind. Different Sons of God, or Watchers, were tasked with overseeing certain sectors of the world.
However, these angelic beings started watching the women a little too closely- lustfully even- and they came down and mated with human women. If this is your first time hearing this, I know how crazy this sounds. Personally, the only reason I believe it is because the Bible says it. Unambiguously.
One more time in the Delorean, let’s go back to:
Genesis 6:1-4
When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. 3 Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.” 4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
This is how the Nephilim, or the giants, were created. When these angelic beings mated with the women, they created offspring that were half-human, half-angel. Or some might say half-human, half-demon, although I don’t think that would be technically correct. I’ll address that in the mailbag segment later.
So this is where the Nephilim giants came from. The offspring of these ancient marriages.
If you’re hearing this for the first time, you’re probably wondering: what in the world are you talking about, Luke? If this were real, why would I just be hearing about it now? Wouldn’t something this wild be mentioned all over the place?
Well, it is. This was common knowledge among the ancient peoples. It’s referenced lots of times throughout the rest of the Bible; even by Jude and Peter in the New Testament.
And it’s the explanation for why we see these other giants throughout Israel’s history in the Old Testament. In fact, let’s talk about that next week. We’ll put a pin in this for now and next week, we’ll talk about Goliath’s Brothers and other Giants of the Bible.

Mailbag
So that’s what we will discuss next time. Make sure you’re subscribed so you can get it!
Ministry update: this past week, I finished my assignment as the Interim Pastor at a church called Bella Vista Assembly of God in gorgeous Northwest Arkansas. It has been an incredible three months for me and my family; truly some of the greatest months of my life.
Unfortunately, it had to come to an end; the new pastor took over this past week. But fortunately for you all, I get to focus a bit more on this podcast now. I honestly kind of struggled to keep up with doing the podcast as well as creating all these sermons and Bible studies that I was teaching while at the church in Arkansas. I wasn’t always satisfied with the quality of some of the episodes over the past few months. And yet, the podcast continued to grow. May was our best month of downloads yet. Two episodes I released that month were our top downloaded ever. So I’m really grateful that it continued to do well despite having so many other priorities lately- not to mention launching the website! So we have a website now: WeirdStuffInTheBible.com. Check it out if you haven’t already done so.
Also, I want to comment on something I read in Genesis 6 a few minutes ago: Then the Lord said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”
That verse has caused many Christians to think that God put a 120-year-limit on the lifespans of human beings. I think that’s a misunderstanding of that verse. In fact, that’s quite literally how the New Living Translation translates it, which I think is a major translational error. So I’m going to put an article on the front page of our website that explains this verse: Genesis 6:3.
So if you enjoyed today’s episode but want to dive just a little deeper, you can go read that article which provides some additional insight into Genesis 6:3. Again, WeirdStuffInTheBible.com.
And I just took a vacation this past week as well, after wrapping up my duties to the church. Wonderful family time. Very thankful for it. Now I’m ready to get to work on producing excellent educational content for both this podcast and the website.
Some mailbag comments I received lately:
Vicki sent this (while I was on vacation, but I got the email while sitting in front of the hotel pool watching my son play in it, so I typed up a response right there but I’ll go ahead and share it here as well): What is the difference between Fallen Angels and demons?
My theory (not that I came up with it, but this is what the book of Enoch teaches) is that the demons or unclean spirits are the spirits of the Nephilim.

The Bible has a few places that hint at this, and it is explicitly stated in the Book of Enoch. 

The traditional view is that demon ARE the fallen angels. However, I’m not aware of a single verse that supports this idea. If anyone knows of a verse that says demons = fallen angels, please let me know. I can’t think of one- despite the fact that this is taught in 99% of churches as what demons are.

I believe the fallen angels are a higher class of being than the demons, that some of them are the fathers of the demons, and that the demons take their marching orders from the fallen angels.

More info: episode 25, The Origin of Demons

I also got a message today from Annie, who has these three questions, “Is Satan a name or does it just mean accuser? Aren’t all the wicked fallen angels Satan? Aren’t there many Satans?”
So on that, the word satan or ha-satan in Hebrew means adversary or accuser. It can be used as a generic word or label to just mean an enemy or someone who stands against you. For example, in the story of Balaam and his donkey in Numbers 22, it said that the Angel of the Lord stood in Balaam’s way as a satan. He was there to block Balaam, to stand against him.
There are other examples we could go to as well, such as I Kings 11. So there can be many Satan’s in that sense, because satan can be a generic word for adversaries. But there is also this one specific guy who is THE Satan (or ha-satan), and he is the Prince of Demons or the ruler of the demonic realm.
This is the serpent who tempted Eve in the Garden, Lucifer, the devil, is referred to as the Accuser of the Brethren, the dragon of Revelation. In fact,
Revelation 12:9 says
And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world
So to me, that verse is making it clear that these are all the same guy. Some theorize that there is a difference between Lucifer and Satan and the Serpent and so on, but this verse seems to nullify that theory.
Now, are all the fallen angels Satan? No. They all work for Satan, but Satan is the one in charge.
So sometimes Jesus might refer to casting out demons as casting out Satan. Doesn’t mean that they are literally Satan, but they all work for Satan.
We do it, too; we might be having a bad day and say something like, “man, the devil is really after me today.” Well, you could very well have demons after you, but Satan himself- THE prince of darkness himself- probably has bigger fish to fry. He’s probably off, you know, writing the next bill for Congress to pass, or making it take 3 years before the next season of Severance comes out. He probably doesn’t even know your name, the real Satan. But there are many demons after you. And I hope you’re making yourself a problem for them; I hope many demons know your name and tremble when you get out bed in the morning.

Giant Killers
And that’s the thought I want to end us with today. Let’s make problems for Satan’s Kingdom.
I love David’s attitude when he sees this giant.
I Samuel 17 tells us he said
who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?
David was like, a teenager, yet he wasn’t intimidated by this giant. He was totally confident in God’s ability to slay this giant through him. He didn’t back down.
As I said during the mailbag segment: we have Goliaths to fight today. And they’re in the spiritual realm. They are the spirits of the ancient giants.
Unlike the giants, we can’t see them. We are flesh; they are spirit. They can do things we can’t.
But guess what: so can God. God can fight the battles we can’t fight in the spirit realm.
And this world might have demons in it, but it’s our world. God gave us the dominion. So you have more authority here than they do. So let there be no intimidation today about this spiritual conflict that we find ourselves in.
Yes, the New Testament warns us about Satan, fallen angels and demons. We take them seriously. But we don’t have to be intimidated by them. If you’re a Christian, that same Holy Spirit that casted out all those demons in the Gospels and Acts now resides in you.
You have Goliaths in your life. But you can also bring them down.
Their heritage is of the giants. Our heritage is of the giant killers.
And if you think slaying giants sounds weird, I hope you’re a little more weird today, too. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time on Weird Stuff in the Bible.