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GEBible — Godless Engineer's Bible App
This verse is examined in more than one Scripture Analysis section. Each lens is shown on its own terms, in the section's own words; GEBible reaches no verdict of its own.
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WEB World English Bible Public Domain ✓
Then one of the young men answered, and said, “Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite who is skillful in playing, a mighty man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and a handsome person; and Yahweh is with him.”
World English Bible
Questions where the Bible appears to say two different things, with the passages on each side set together.
1 Samuel 16:18 introduces David to Saul as already "a mighty valiant man, and a man of war." One chapter later, 1 Samuel 17:33 has Saul calling David a youth incapable of fighting Goliath, and David unable to even walk in armor he has never tried on.
Critical scholarship: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction.
The proposed answers and sources for each reading are on the question page.
Each section sets the viewpoints side by side; you weigh the evidence. Here, "critical scholarship" means academic study, not a value judgment. How this is built →
Within each section, grouped by shared field or question type — not a cross-section comparison.
One of these tensions involves a difference in wording across manuscripts or translations. Examine the original language on Lemma →
This citation refers to this GEBible page — the verse and the analysis gathered here. To cite the underlying scholarship, cite those sources directly.
"1 Samuel 16:18 — Scripture Analysis" GEBible, https://gebible.app/analysis/verse/1-samuel/16/18?version=WEB (retrieved 26 August 2026).