Was Goliath a giant? Height differences and Saul

Image from David (2025)

Somewhere before I've made the following point about the height comparison between Saul and Goliath, but I can't seem to locate where so I'll lay it out again. While most translations of the Bible still give Saul's height as "six cubits and a span" (around 9'6") this is because either they are too old to know better, or because – often in contravention of their stated approaches to ancient manuscript selection – they prefer to preserve "tradition" over best practice.

One of the few exceptions here is the NRSVUE (even the earlier version of the NRSV get this wrong). It gives Saul's height as "four cubits and a span" (around 6'6"). A footnote states "Q ms Gk: MT six". This means that there are variations here between manuscripts. The Masoretic text (MT) gives the height as six cubits and a span, but both the Dead Sea Scrolls text (Q) and the Greek Septuagint text (Gk) give the height as just four cubits and a span. Because "we" ave known about the Masoretic text the longest, it's the one that became the standard, but since then we have discovered the older, (therefore written closer to the original) Dead Sea Scrolls text. 

Sorry if that's a bit complicated, but essentially, faced with two older texts that say Goliath was four cubits and a span; and one more recent text that say it was six cubits the most likely scenario is that the doubly attested shorter Goliath is the closer match to the original text. This is particularly true given (as many David films have amply demonstrated) later adaptations have a tendency to exaggerate the story to make it seem more exciting and/or give God/David more credit. It's really hard to imagine a scenario where anyone would want to the tell the story making the giant seem shorter.

The thing is that if Goliath really were only 6'6" this does change the story a lot, because Goliath was not the only tall person on the battlefield that week. 1 Sam 9:2 describes Saul as being "head and shoulders above everyone else". It's hard to give a precise figure from such a malleable description, but it would suggest he was also well over 6 foot and more importantly he was also in a special category size-wise.

In other words, perhaps the point here is that this was meant to be Saul's fight. Goliath was the Philistine's champion and he calls out Israel's champion, their super tall warrior, their best fighter (as was fairly typical of tribal leaders in those days). He calls out Saul. But Saul is has a crisis of confidence. He fails to trust God (in contrast to David). It's just another way in which the text wants to shame Saul and glorify David. And I suppose the way the textual translation of the text has gone has softened that criticism of Saul a bit through time. Even a 6'6" man would baulk at fighting a man who is perhaps even 9'9". And perhaps given Saul clearly had very poor mental health, maybe cutting him some slack (even if through the medium of poor translation) is not the worst thing in the world.