Goliath and the sons of Rapha

The Masoretic Text gives Goliath's height as six cubits and a span, about 9'9" at an 18-inch cubit and a 9-inch span; the Septuagint, 4QSam-a (the only Hebrew Dead Sea Scrolls witness to the verse), and Josephus all read four cubits and a span, about 6'9". The difference is two cubits, three feet, and a real textual problem. The case for the shorter reading is J. Daniel Hays's, who argues that the Masoretic number is a scribal error and that the Qumran and Greek evidence preserves the better text. Clyde Billington answered him in the same journal, arguing that the two readings don't conflict at all. The Septuagint translator worked in Alexandria, where the royal Egyptian cubit of 20.65 inches was the standard, and converted the Hebrew text's common cubits into royal ones; at four royal cubits and a span Goliath comes out a little over 7'8". Billington concludes that the Masoretic six cubits is original and that Goliath stood just over eight feet, measured in a common cubit of about sixteen inches, and Hays replied in the same issue. The Greek tradition isn't uniform either, since some Septuagint witnesses read six cubits and Codex Venetus reads five. Even at four cubits Goliath towers over his period, whose male skeletal remains run under 5'6". Ishbi-benob's spear is said to weigh three hundred shekels, about half the weight given for Goliath's in 1 Samuel 17:7, keeping the whole clan's scale consistent. A widely repeated claim about two seven-foot female skeletons found at Tell es-Sa'idiyeh traces to a misheard museum lecture and not to any publication; Heiser corresponded with the excavator at the British Museum in 2014, who confirmed no such skeletons exist. Rabbinic tradition (Babylonian Talmud, Sotah) goes further and makes Orpah, Ruth's sister-in-law, the mother of Goliath and his brothers, her Moabite ancestry carrying the blood of the Emim giants, with a pun on her having kissed (nashaq) Naomi goodbye where Ruth clung (davaq) to her.

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