Goliath represents the impulse to put all our hope in man; to stockpile; to amass; to find salvation in the strength of a singular Giant. This is why Goliath is so very big. David represents the Jewish impulse to put all our hope in God. This is why he, David, is so very small.
Goliath is a tempter—he has “scaled armor” (1 Sam 17:5) like the Leviathan, Satan, of whom it is said, “his protective scales are his pride” (Job 41:15). Goliath tempts the Israelites for forty days. “Rabbi Yoḥanan says: ‘These days correspond to the forty days over which the Torah was given, as he [Goliath] wanted to do away with it’” (Talmud, Sotah 42b:4).
The Torah, the Law of God, restricted the Israelite army from fighting except insofar as they trusted God. The priests of God were to administer courage as a sacrament to all the ranks. Those who lacked it were commanded to leave.
The Israelites were terrified of Goliath, and in their terror they broke a commandment: “you shall not be afraid of them, for the Lord God is with you” (Deut 20:1). Then they broke another: “What man is there that is fearful and fainthearted? Let him go back to his house” (Deut 20:8). They trembled, but did not go home. For forty days, they were not a “light to the nations” but a scandal confirming the nations in their unbelief.
David’s hypothetical question in Psalm 115—“why should the nations say, ‘where is there God?’”—receives a very real answer: “because the people under his loving protection don’t act like it.”
Men who are afraid tend to amass their hope for salvation in other men, whose visible strength provides them the security they do not trust the invisible God to give. As a social body, each abdicates his power upwards to other men. Each puts “trust in princes.” The result, in every age, is social weakness. Where the trust of “the many” is in a mortal “one,” it is sufficient to destroy the one in order to rout the many.
But a social body that trusts in an Immortal Prince is strong—they have no human pillar upon which to lean their hopes for salvation. Kill any number of their commanders—the Lord is still present as their king. “Trust in God” distributes and confirms the power of each—God is equally the “the Lord, valiant in war” to Israel’s smallest child as to its greatest commander.
Goliath tempts the Israelites to break their law, to fight as fearful men fight, and so to mirror the nation they oppose: a social body fearfully subordinated to human strength as the source of their salvation. Goliath shouts: “Am I not a Philistine, and are you not servants of Saul? Choose a man for yourselves, and let him come down to me” (1 Sam 17:8).
“Rabbi Yoḥanan says: He [shouted morning and evening] specifically in order to prevent [the Israelites] from completing the recitation of Shema in the required times of morning and evening” (Sotah 42b:4). This is fitting: Shema is a liturgy of obedience to God. In it the Jews say: “We have no King or Redeemer but You.” Goliath disrupts their declaration of trust in the immortal King with a demand that the Israelites summarize themselves in a mortal king, “a man.”
Goliath “defies” the uniqueness of the children of God, and tempts them to arrange themselves “like unto all the other nations” (1 Sam 8:5, 20), to operate out of their individual desire for self-preservation. “Why come out in battle formation?” he asks. That is, “why come out as a united social body? Rather (as the medieval commentator Rashi puts it) “Let one representing all of you fight against me.”
For all Goliath’s bluster, it is the fear of death that speaks. He says, “Why risk it? Why clash as many against many when we can simply summarize the many in one? Isn’t it more reasonable to be represented by one man?”
The Israelites are largely taken in. Saul, their idolatrous king, works hard to produce the very source of human strength that Goliath suggests, promising women, wealth, and favors to the one who will summarize the Israelite army in himself—who will become Goliath to defeat Goliath. It is with good humor that the Lord raises up David. It is a remedial action of God, designed to rebuke the apostatizing Israelites, who trusted God so little that the rabbis say they were writing bills of divorce so that their wives would be able to remarry should they die with no one to witness it.
The Israelites were supposed to defeat the nations by being trusting children of God; when they failed, God sent an actual child to redeem them. The Israelites were legally obliged to remember that “the Lord fights against your enemies, to give you the victory” (Deut 20:4), and David explicitly reminds them of the fact, saying that he will defeat Goliath, not to be exalted as an mortal king (indeed, Samuel has already anointed him king, not as a champion, but as a shepherd and the least of his brothers), but to reinstate the prayer of Shema and to rouse up trust in the Immortal King: “I will strike you down ... that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear; for the battle is the Lord’s and he will give you into our hand.” (1 Sam 17:47)
It is as if God were to say, “Ah, you would put your trust in man, would you? Very well, I’ll give you a man. I’ll give you a kid who can’t walk in armor. I’ll give you a country kid who fights champions with a slingshot. I’ll save you through someone you tell to “go home,” that, when he takes the victory, you will be ashamed, astounded, and utterly unable to ascribe to human strength that salvation which comes from the Lord.”
“When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled” (1 Sam 17:51). This is a merciful structure of nature: precisely because the wicked are fearful, and so condemned to amass their strength into some singular human stronghold; precisely for this reason they vanish like smoke. As the Bible puts it, “a thousand shall flee at the sight of one” (Is 30:17). Their strength is weakness, for the society composed of submission to human power is dissolved by the destruction of that human power. David decapitated Goliath, and this signified the weakness of the Philistines. They had become the body of a human Leviathan, and so died without their head. But the Israelites’ weakness is strength. By needing God from the beginning they are saved from needing the securities of man in the end. They have no head but God.
This exegesis was first printed in Marc Barnes’ “Overture,” his freewheeling introduction to each new issue of New Polity Magazine. Don’t miss out on all our best writing. Subscribe today.