David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

321–30.
    Claudius Quadrigarius’s account of single combat is from Ross Cowan, For the Glory of Rome (Greenhill Books, 2007), 140. No one in ancient times would have doubted David’s tactical advantage once it was known that he was an expert in slinging. Here is the Roman military historian Vegetius ( Military Matters, Book I):
    Recruits are to be taught the art of throwing stones both with the hand and sling. The inhabitants of the Balearic Islands are said to have been the inventors of slings, and to have managed them with surprising dexterity, owing to the manner of bringing up their children. The children were not allowed to have their food by their mothers till they had first struck it with their sling. Soldiers, notwithstanding their defensive armor, are often more annoyed by the round stones from the sling than by all the arrows of the enemy. Stones kill without mangling the body, and the contusion is mortal without loss of blood. It is universally known the ancients employed slingers in all their engagements. There is the greater reason for instructing all troops, without exception, in this exercise, as the sling cannot be reckoned any encumbrance, and often is of the greatest service, especially when they are obliged to engage in stony places, to defend a mountain or an eminence, or to repulse an enemy at the attack of a castle or city.
    Moshe Garsiel’s chapter “The Valley of Elah Battle and the Duel of David with Goliath: Between History and Artistic Theological Historiography” appears in Homeland and Exile (Brill, 2009).
    Baruch Halpern’s discussion of the sling appears in David’s Secret Demons (Eerdmans Publishing, 2001), 11.
    For Eitan Hirsch’s calculations, see Eitan Hirsch, Jaime Cuadros, and Joseph Backofen, “David’s Choice: A Sling and Tactical Advantage,” International Symposium on Ballistics (Jerusalem, May 21–24, 1995). Hirsch’s paper is full of paragraphs like this:
    Experiments with cadavers and hybrid simulation models indicate that an impact energy of 72 joules is sufficient to perforate (but not exit) a cranium when it is impacted on the parietal portion of the skull with a 6.35 mm diameter steel projectile at 370 m/s. A projectile does not have to perforate the skull, but just crush a part of the frontal bone to produce a depressed skull fracture (at best), or a stunning blow to render a person unconscious. Such an impact produces strain in the blood vessels and brain tissues upon impact to the front of the skull…because the motion of the brain lags the motion of the skull. The impact energy required to achieve these two effects are much lower, on the order of 40 to 20 joules, respectively.
    Hirsch presented his analysis at a scientific meeting. In an e-mail to me, he added:
    A day after the lecture was given an attendee came to me telling me that in the creek on the site where the duel took place one could find stones of Barium Sulphate which had a mass density of 4.2 grams/cc (compared to about 2.4 in usually found stones). If David chose one of those to use against Goliath it gave him significant advantage in addition to the calculated numbers brought in the tables.
    Robert Dohrenwend’s article “The Sling: Forgotten Firepower of Antiquity” ( Journal of Asian Martial Arts 11, no. 2 [2002]) is a very good introduction to the power of the sling.
    Moshe Dayan’s essay about David and Goliath, “Spirit of the Fighters,” appears in Courageous Actions—Twenty Years of Independence 11 (1968): 50–52.
    The idea that Goliath suffered from acromegaly appears to have first been suggested in C. E. Jackson, P. C. Talbert, and H. D. Caylor, “Hereditary Hyperparathyroidism,” Journal of the Indiana State Medical Association 53 (1960): 1313–16, and then by David Rabin and Pauline Rabin in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine on October 20, 1983. Subsequently a number of other medical experts reached the same conclusion. In a letter to the journal Radiology (July 1990), Stanley Sprecher writes:
    Undoubtedly Goliath’s great size was due to acromegaly secondary to a pituitary macroadenoma. This pituitary adenoma was apparently large enough to induce visual field deficits by its pressure on the optic chiasm, which made Goliath unable to follow the young David as he circled him. The stone entered Goliath’s cranial vault through a markedly thinned frontal bone, which resulted from enlargement of the frontal paranasal sinus, a frequent feature of