Goliath.
David and Goliath
Everyone knows a boy beat a giant. Far fewer people know the boy turned down the armour he was offered, and did it for a completely practical reason. He was not being brave about it. He was being sensible.
What giant did David defeat with a sling and a stone?
👉 Goliath.
The armour did not fit and he had never worn any
The two armies were camped on opposite hills with a valley between them. Nobody wanted to attack uphill, so they sat there.
Goliath came out every morning and every evening for forty days with the same offer. Send one man. Whoever wins, the other side surrenders. He was over nine feet tall by the account in 1 Samuel 17, and he was armed with bronze from head to shin.
David arrived carrying bread and cheese for his brothers. He was not a soldier. He was the youngest of eight and he had been left with the sheep.
When he volunteered, King Saul put his own armour on him. A helmet, a coat of mail, a sword.
David took it all off again. His reason is in the text and it is not modesty. He said he could not walk in it, because he had never tried. Putting an untrained teenager inside heavy armour would have made him slower, blinder and easier to kill.
So he went out with the thing he had used every day for years.
A sling was not a toy
This is where the popular version quietly misleads.
A sling in that period was a serious military weapon. Armies kept units of slingers. A stone leaving a sling travels fast enough to kill. A trained slinger could hit a target at a distance that would surprise most people.
David had spent his working life using one to drive off animals from a flock. He was not an amateur with a lucky throw. He was a specialist, and he had just declined to fight in a style he had never practised.
He picked up five stones from the stream. Five, not one. He had planned for missing.
Then he did something the story reports almost in passing. He ran at Goliath rather than waiting. A slinger needs distance and a heavily armoured man closing that distance is the whole danger. David removed the problem by attacking first.
One stone. It was over before Goliath’s own weapons were in range.
What we can take from this
You are usually better off with the thing you have practised than the thing that looks impressive.
The armour was the obvious choice. It was the king’s own. Turning it down in front of everybody would have looked like nerves.
It was also useless to him, and he seems to have been the only person in the camp who could say so out loud.
Most people can name their own version of that armour. The tool everyone uses that you have never got on with. The way of doing things that works for the person who recommended it and has never once worked for you. There is real pressure to put it on anyway, because refusing looks like you are not taking it seriously.
The interesting part is that David did not argue that the armour was bad. He argued that it was bad for him, having never trained in it. That is a narrower and much harder claim to make about yourself.
And he still took five stones. Confidence in the method is not the same as certainty about the outcome.
One thing worth sitting with
Forty days went by with a whole army listening to the same challenge twice a day.
Nobody in that camp was less equipped than the teenager who turned up with lunch. So what exactly had been stopping them, and would we have been any different standing on that hill?
Something on near you
Most people find the thing they are good at by doing it for years while nobody is watching.
Walkn on Water lists 263 youth groups across New Zealand where that tends to happen. See what is near you