David or Goliath: The Jews' Typecast Might Surprise You

“What they didn’t understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength, was also the source of his greatest weakness.”

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Three thousand years ago, when the Kingdom of Israel was in its infancy, the battle between David versus Goliath took place in the Valley of Elah, in what is now the State of Israel.¹

Ancient Israel had a mountain range called the Shephelah, which linked the ancient and obviously significant cities of that region — namely Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron.

There was also a coastal plain, parallel to the Mediterranean Sea, where Tel Aviv is now. And the Shephelah connected the mountain range with the coastal plain, including a series of valleys and ridges that ran east to west, such as the Valley of Elah, which had a strategic function, because it was the means by which you accessed the aforementioned ancient cities.

The Philistines, among the Kingdom of Israel’s fiercest enemies at the time, were living along coastal plain and wanted to occupy the Valley of Elah, so they could split the Kingdom of Israel in half. King Saul, the Israelite leader, obviously caught wind of this and brought his army down from the mountains to confront the Philistines in the Valley of Elah.

Eventually, the Israelites and Philistines became deadlocked because neither could attack the other; in order to do so, you needed to either go down or up the valley, which would completely expose you. So, finally, to break the deadlock, the Philistines sent their mightiest warrior, Goliath.

Insolently challenging the Israelites to appoint one of their number to meet him in single combat — a tradition in ancient warfare to settle disputes without incurring massive bloodshed — the condition was that the people whose champion is killed will become the other’s slaves.

Goliath was some 210 centimeters tall (6 feet 9 inches), decked out in bronze armor and a brass helmet, holding a sword in one hand and a spear in the other. The staff of his spear is said to have been like a weaver’s beam, the spear’s head weighing 600 shekels of iron.

According to the Jerusalem Talmud, Goliath was born by polyspermy (fertilization of an egg by more than one person) and had approximately 100 fathers.² The Talmud stresses that his taunts before the Israelites included the boast that it was he who had captured the Ark of the Covenant and brought it to the temple of Dagon, and his challenges to combat were made at morning and evening in order to disturb the Israelites in their prayers.

Who the heck would want to fight him one-on-one? Hence why none of the Israelites volunteered, except a young shepherd boy, who King Saul could not possibly take seriously.

Ultimately, the boy convinced King Saul to let him proceed, and King Saul tried to give him ample armor, but the boy declined and instead brought with him five ordinary stones. The boy then walked down to meet Goliath, face-to-face. As Goliath sees the boy walking down to ward him, he also does not take the boy seriously and starts taunting him from afar, yelling:

“Come to me so I can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field!”

The boy then appeared before Goliath, a few meters or yards away from him, took out his slingshot, and flung one of the stones at Goliath, hitting him squarely in the forehead. Immediately, Goliath fell to the ground, although it was unclear if he died on the spot, or if the boy simply knocked him out unconscious.

Then, the boy took Goliath’s sword and cut off his head, causing a knee-jerk reaction by the Philistines who, clearly shocked by the events, fled in the opposite direction. The boy is, of course, David, hence the phrase “David versus Goliath” — denoting an underdog situation, a contest wherein a weaker opponent faces a substantially stronger one.

Scholars today believe that Goliath’s original listed killer was Elhanan, son of Jair, and that the Deuteronomic history’s authors changed the original text to credit David, a more famous character, with the victory.

But the story gets even better: Scholars also believe that Goliath, not David, was the underdog. Part of the “David versus Goliath” tale that often does not get told is the part where an attendant escorted Goliath to meet the Israelites and propose single combat. Why on earth would Goliath, such a physically imposing superhuman, need an attendant? Because scholars believe he had a vision problem.

You see, Goliath was indeed a giant, and the modern medical community has determined that many extraordinarily tall people — such as Andre the Giant and Robert Wadlow, the tallest person of all-time — have a condition of acromegaly. It is caused by a benign tumor that sits on the pituitary gland, resulting in overproduction of human growth hormone. There is even speculation that Abraham Lincoln had acromegaly.

As the tumor grows, it usually starts to compress the brain’s visual nerves, giving people with acromegaly double-vision, or making them severely near-sighted. This explains why Goliath might have underestimated his counterpart — he could not really see him and his slingshot until it was too late.

The phrase “Come to me in Come to me so I can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field!” is also telling: Perhaps Goliath could only fight David at an arm’s distance, whereas David only needed to get close enough to accurately and lethally hit Goliath with his slingshot. (Word has it that, back then, slingshot “professionals” were incredibly accurate from up to 200 meters away.)

The Israelites, looking down from the mountain, thought Goliath was a frighteningly powerful foe, but “what they didn’t understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength,” said Malcolm Gladwell, “was also the source of his greatest weakness.”³

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Nowadays, Israel and, by extension, the Jews are painted as Goliath — powerful, dominant, wealthy, well-connected, even controlling and menacing. There are misconceptions and conspiracy theories, and then there are the facts.

And the facts are that the Jewish People make up approximately one-five hundredth (1/500) of the world’s population. The geographic land of Israel is about one-two hundredth (1/200) of the landmass across the Middle East. And Israelis are about one-fiftieth (1/50) of the region’s total population.⁴

Jews are indigenous to the Levant (i.e. the land of Israel), yet we are slurred as usurping colonial settlers. Israel’s regional enemies control forces with well over a million men under arms, including the Iranian military and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Houthis, Hezbollah, the Syrian armed forces, various Syrian and Iraqi militias, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

And these forces enjoy the patronage of other powers, including Russia and China to a not insignificant degree.

These forces are arrayed to Israel’s northern, eastern, and southern and southwestern borders — and are sworn to the Jewish state’s literal destruction. This is not a mere grand design; their plan is to foment the actual destruction of the country, all of which is within the range of tens of thousands of rockets, missiles, and other weapons.

Israel is in a brutal war with Hamas — a war started by Hamas, following one of the most barbaric terror attacks in modern history — and still Hamas enjoys the patronage of NATO member Turkey, Western regional ally Qatar and, of course, Iran (which just received $10 billion in sanctions relief).

And this is after Israel ceded the entire territory of Gaza to the Palestinians in 2005 so they could enjoy sovereignty over it, and attempted earnestly to negotiate an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from 1991 onwards, only to be rewarded with a murderous “intifada” which Israel's enemies now seek to globalize.

Israel faces a coordinated global diplomatic and legal assault, from the United Nations and its agencies, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, South Africa, and countless others. Only Israel comes in for unrelenting diplomatic and legal pressure, not Hamas, Qatar, Turkey, Iran, or any other regional malefactor.

Israel faces a coordinated global propaganda assault in world media, including via malevolent Qatari, Chinese, and Russian influences, as well as from the far Left, which has hijacked much of academia and other institutions, the undying antisemitism of the far Right, and highly coordinated demonstrations in Western capitals — all of which focus exclusively on Palestinian suffering and fastidiously ignore that Hamas built an underground tunnel network larger than the London underground, armed itself to the teeth, perverted most civilian infrastructure in Gaza for military use, uses the entire enclave as a human shield and, until Israel put a stop to it, covered half of Israel with daily rocket fire.

Since 2005, Israel faces global attempts at boycotts through the malicious BDS movement, as well as concerted efforts to tar individual Israelis and Jews with pariah status in academia, business, medicine, culture, government, and the arts.

In addition, Israel is being asked to free convicted terrorist murderers in exchange for the return of kidnapped civilians. And this garners no real media or public commentary, let alone understanding or sympathy.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world desire Israel’s literal destruction, unique among the nations of the earth.

Israel has sought peace from the time of its recreation in 1948. It has also not known a day of true, lasting peace since 1948.

So yes, once more for the folks in the back: Israel and, by extension, the Jews are David. The forces arrayed against it are Goliath. Thankfully for Israel and the Jews, we know how this story ends.

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1. “The unheard story of David and Goliath | Malcolm Gladwell.” TED.

2. Jerusalem Talmud Yebamoth, 24b.

3. “The unheard story of David and Goliath | Malcolm Gladwell.” TED.

4. Kamel Amin Thaabet on X