I’ll never forget sitting in one of Sandra Ricther’s Old Testament courses at Asbury when she began to lay out a case that Goliath was actually struck in the shin, and not in the forehead. In the 1970’s a cash of ancient Philistine documents had been discovered and scholar Gordon Hugenberger had painstakingly analyzed each and every word resulting in a strange discovery.

You might remember at the time of David and Goliath’s meeting, very few warriors in Israel had armor. Possibly only Saul and Jonathan (1 Samuel 13:22). As a people, Israel was not actually comprised of warriors. Most of them were subsistence farmers and pastoralists who had small flocks. They would have been walking farmer’s almanacs – not experts on everything to do with battle.

As is common among people who find a new item or innovation in another culture, they borrow that culture’s word for it. For example, the Chinese word for coffee basically sounds like coffee precisely because it was introduced to the Chinese people late in their development as a culture. Instead of inventing their own name for coffee, they just borrowed the English term. The same is true of the word chocolate. It’s also a borrowed word in Chinese.

As Hugenberger familiarized himself with the Philistine documents he began to learn their rather specific and intricate words for a warrior’s armor. Among many other things, he realized that the Philistine word for “shin guard” sounded exactly like the Hebrew word our bibles translate as “frontlet” or “greaves.” Hugenberger, citing the nature of how grammar and spelling work within semitic languages like Hebrew made a very compelling case that when Goliath is described, the Israelites are actually borrowing Philistine words to paint the picture.

Goliath was different…..he was really tall and big, but in a Hebrew mind that didn’t actually possess a technical knowledge of war, even his outfit was foreign. What our bibles most often translate as “frontlet” would have actually been a Philistine word that means shin guard.

Not sure if you’ve noticed it before, but it kind of makes sense. When Goliath gets hit, he falls face first. Slinging stones, even one slung by an adolescent David, would have traveled at several dozens of feet per second. The stone buries itself in Goliath’s malleable bronze armor,  and if that was his shin guard, then his leg would have been shattered, and knocked backward, out from beneath him.  And that would have put Goliath on his face – very much alive, and very much in a lot of pain. Had he been hit in the forehead, physics would tell us that he’d fall back – not on his face.

While all of this is interesting, the main point for me is: In the multiple thousands of Hebrew and Aramaic words that comprise the Old Testament, across almost three thousand years of translation, this is the only one I’ve read about that appears to have been mistranslated. Meanings of words are debated here and there for sure, but a genuine mistranslation is more than exceedingly rare. That tells me that we can trust our bibles.

And if this is true, it also points to David’s faith. Maybe he wasn’t a bull’s eye shot? Maybe he was really just a kid, who trusted in his God, and went forth in wild abandon to do what he knew in his heart was right?