Goliath
And there was again a battle in Gob with the Philistines, where Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim, a Bethlehemite, slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam. 2 Samuel 21:19 [The words "the brother of" were inserted by the KJV translators to avoid the obvious contradiction with 1 Samuel 17:49-51.]
Cited passages
There was again war with the Philistines at Gob; and Elhanan the son of Jaare-Oregim the Bethlehemite killed Goliath the Gittite’s brother, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam.
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. 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.
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.
This is among the most consequential and most awkward harmonizations in the King James tradition. The Hebrew of 2 Samuel 21:19, rendered word for word, reads: "And Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim the Bethlehemite struck down Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam." There is no phrase corresponding to "the brother of." The KJV supplied "the brother of" in italics—at least flagging it as not present in the source—but the Masoretic Hebrew states plainly that Elhanan killed Goliath. The distinctive detail "the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam" is the very phrase used of Goliath in 1 Samuel 17:7, binding the two notices to one and the same figure.
This collides head-on with 1 Samuel 17, where the youth David fells Goliath in the celebrated single combat in the Valley of Elah. Two different slayers, one named victim, both narratives offered as historical report. The verse sits within a short catalogue (2 Samuel 21:15-22) of four Philistine champions, descendants of "the giant" (hā-rāpâ) of Gath, each killed by one of David's warriors—Ishbi-benob, Saph, Goliath, and an unnamed six-fingered giant. The list reads as an old, independent tradition about the heroic deeds of David's men, and within it the killing of Goliath is simply one entry among several, attributed to a comparatively obscure Bethlehemite named Elhanan. The most economical historical reconstruction, defended by McCarter and many critical scholars, runs in this direction: the older tradition credited the Goliath kill to Elhanan, and the famous David-and-Goliath narrative of 1 Samuel 17 is a later, theologically charged literary development that transferred the feat to the rising king. The presence of a textually expanded and unstable 1 Samuel 17 (the Septuagint of that chapter is dramatically shorter than the Masoretic Text) reinforces the impression of a story that grew.
The Chronicler, with both Samuel narratives before him, evidently noticed the clash and resolved it. 1 Chronicles 20:5 reads: "Elhanan son of Jair struck down Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver's beam." A previously unattested brother named Lahmi is introduced to absorb Elhanan's kill, leaving David the sole slayer of Goliath. The mechanics of the change are visible in the consonants. The phrase in 2 Samuel 21:19 that the MT reads as bêt hallaḥmî, "the Bethlehemite," appears in Chronicles reanalyzed: the element laḥmî has been detached and treated as a personal name, "Lahmi," and the syntax rearranged with 'aḥî ("brother of") supplied. In other words, the same string of consonants that designated Elhanan's hometown in Samuel was reread in Chronicles as the name of Goliath's brother. Whether the Chronicler made this move himself or inherited a tradition that had already done so, the result is a harmonizing rewrite, and it is the source from which the KJV's italicized "the brother of" in 2 Samuel 21:19 was retrojected.
A further harmonizing proposal posits two separate giants both called Goliath, but this multiplies entities to save the appearances and ignores the shared "weaver's beam" formula that ties 2 Samuel 21:19 to 1 Samuel 17:7. The critical consensus—McCarter, Klein, Knoppers, Tsumura, Auld, Japhet—is that 2 Samuel 21:19 preserves the older, embarrassing tradition, and that both the Chronicler's "Lahmi the brother" and the KJV's bracketed insertion are successive editorial rescues of David's exclusive claim to the kill.
Where the critical reading lands: a genuine contradiction in the underlying tradition, with the harmonization built into the canonical text of Chronicles and the KJV by later hands.
Sources for this reading