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1 Samuel 17:49-50 says David killed Goliath with a sling and a stone and that "there was no sword in the hand of David." The very next verse, 1 Samuel 17:51, has David running over, drawing Goliath's own sword, and killing him with it. Within two verses Goliath dies twice by two different weapons.
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Cited passages
David put his hand in his bag, took a stone, and slung it, and struck the Philistine in his forehead. The stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the earth. So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and struck the Philistine, and killed him; but there was no sword in the hand of David.
Cited passages
Then David ran, stood over the Philistine, took his sword, drew it out of its sheath, killed him, and cut off his head with it. When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled.
Notes on manuscript readings that bear on this passage — where the surviving witnesses differ over what the text says. Presented for transparency as the textual critic’s description, not as GEBible’s conclusion about the tension.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Read consecutively, the two verses describe two different lethal acts. Verse 49 narrates the sling-stone striking Goliath's forehead so that he falls on his face. Verse 50 then supplies an emphatic editorial summary: "So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and smote the Philistine, and slew him; but there was no sword in the hand of David." That closing clause — *we-cherev eyn be-yad David* — is the narrator inserting a deliberate theological comment, not merely reporting a sequence. Verse 51 then has David run up, stand over Goliath, draw the giant's own sword from its sheath, "and slew him, and cut off his head therewith." The verb in 17:50 is the hiphil *wayemitehu* ("and he put him to death"), and in 17:51 the polel *waymotetehu* ("and he dispatched/finished him"); both render naturally as "and he killed him," and the same root *mwt* governs both.
The standard harmonization, advanced by Archer, Kaiser, and David Tsumura in the NICOT volume, reads verse 50 as a proleptic summary of the whole encounter and verse 51 as the narrated detail: the stone felled and mortally wounded Goliath, and the sword stroke was the coup de grace and decapitation. Tsumura grounds this in a recognized feature of Hebrew narrative — the summary-then-resumptive-detail pattern, where a verse states the outcome and a following verse fills in the mechanics. On this reading the polel *waymotetehu* in v. 51 carries the nuance "finished him off," perfectly compatible with the stone having already done the decisive damage. As a description of Hebrew narrative syntax this is not implausible; the pattern genuinely exists.
The friction the harmonization must absorb is the function of the clause "there was no sword in the hand of David." That is not part of a neutral summary of stage one of a two-stage kill; it is a pointed theological aside, the same theology David voices in 17:47 — "the LORD saveth not with sword and spear." The narrator is asserting the manner of victory as the point: deliverance came without a sword. Verse 51 then puts a sword — Goliath's own — into David's hand and has him kill with it. The reader is asked to hold "no sword killed him" and "David killed him with the sword" within two verses.
Text-criticism again clarifies the mechanism. The block of MT material peculiar to the longer recension (relative to LXX-B) includes verse 50; the shorter Old Greek moves directly from the stone-strike to David running and dispatching Goliath with the sword (the substance of vv. 49, 51), without the intervening editorial summary of v. 50. McCarter and Tov treat v. 50 as part of the secondary expansion. If the shorter text is earlier, the contradiction is the by-product of a later editor's theological gloss colliding with the inherited sword narrative; the original told a single, coherent account in which the sling fells Goliath and the sword finishes and beheads him.
The upshot is a genuine fork for the harmonizer. Either v. 50 is a redactional addition — in which case the canonical text is demonstrably composite and the "no sword" clause is a later editor's theology, not the original storyline — or the summary-then-detail reading is correct and the narrator emphatically denied a sword in v. 50 only to narrate a sword-kill in v. 51, which strains the plain force of his own gloss. The summary-then-detail reading is grammatically viable for the *killing* verbs; what it cannot comfortably absorb is the deliberate "no sword" assertion.
Where the critical reading lands: harmonizable at the level of Hebrew narrative syntax (summary then detail), but the emphatic "no sword" clause is better explained as a secondary theological gloss preserved unevenly in the textual tradition — partially harmonizable, with the residual tension located in v. 50's editorial comment.
Sources for this reading