1 Samuel Lesson 22

The Philistine Challenge – 17:1-11

Let’s turn to 1 Samuel 17 and we’ll see an incident that is famous throughout Sunday School literature, David and Goliath. There are some modern misconceptions of David and Goliath, the first one we can dispose of immediately is that David was not a little boy with a slingshot. David was a young warrior at this time and he was not the little boy that you see painted in the Sunday School coloring charts. David was a young man; he’d finished ROTC and he’d gotten his commission and now he was a warrior. His selection of the slingshot is something we’ll get into later on, as to why he used that. But in 17:1 we’re introduced to the Philistines and the background, and tonight we’re going to deal with the first 11 verses of this chapter and it’s about all we can do to give you an adequate background for the Philistines, who they were, what they were doing, how God worked with this people and to show you what the nature of Goliath’s challenge was. You have to understand all of this to appreciate why David did what he did and why the pressure was on.

Now so we don’t lose the forest for the trees, let’s go back to the overall structure. Last week I said 16: to the end of chapter 17, correct that, it’s 16:1-18:4. And that is that God chooses David as second incumbent in the office of king-messiah. God chooses His second incumbent, that’s the theme of chapters 16-17 and the first four verses of chapter 18. We have divided this up, first in 16:1-13 God guides Samuel to anoint David. That is the first thing that we have studied. We have shown that you cannot have a king without a king-maker, you cannot have a man appointed to this high office without a prophet there to appoint him. Then from 16:14 on through the end of chapter 16 we had the first empirical evidence that David really was the anointed. This is the other thing that you want to emphasize over and over as you read your Bible, that when God does a work, and this one was done in secret, that does not nullify the importance of overt evidences. And so if God truly did anoint David then there should be some external observable type evidence.

Last week we spent a long time which was necessary to explain to you the verses on David and music. And we pointed out how David’s first evidence was his musical ability. And to most of you that probably sounds very strange as to why musical ability should be associated with a warrior. But this in the ancient world at this time was one of the great measurements of a true warrior, was his ability to use music because they believed and they had a psychological principle of warfare that you didn’t just fight with your body, you fought with your soul. And so music became very important to the warrior because it trained his soul. And music was the means by which the warrior’s soul would be brought under the spirit of the composer and/or the performer. So music played a vital influence and we find David able to play the harp so skillfully that demon powers that were oppressing Saul were driven away from Saul’s soul. Why? Because in some way, which I do not understand, but nevertheless, in some way the music appears to have brought order out of chaos inside Saul’s soul, with the result that the demon powers were not able to penetrate and affect him or terrify him and so they departed.

Now beginning in 17:1 and continuing through 18:4 we have the second empirical evidence of David’s anointing. And this one is his military skill. So we have two things, his musical ability and his military ability and these two abilities were demonstrated under unusual situations. God engineers the unusual situations to test believers. Now the word in the New Testament that is used for the word “test” and it does not mean temptation. It is sometimes translated “prove,” it is used in Romans 12:1-2, the famous dedication verse. And it says do all this “that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” Now here the word “prove” is a word that means to bring out into the open. It is used to refine impure metals. And it means that you take a believer, one believer plus pressure and the pressure has to be under God’s sovereignty, 1 Corinthians 10:13, “no testing has taken you but such as is common to man, and God with the pressure will make a way of escape,” but you take one believer, add some pressure, and then that believer, if he is on positive volition, will expose grace. In other words it will give God an opportunity to bless that person in the pressure situation; the person is on positive volition and therefore open to grace and so you add the pressure to cause him to appropriate grace and as a result God’s grace is magnified and God is glorified.

So God engineers situations and circumstances to bring out into the open His work that all men may see. God engineered the first test; it was no accident that Saul became demon afflicted when he did; that was deliberately allowed by the sovereignty of God so that when Saul was delivered through David’s music, on a temporary basis, then it was a situation that was enabling God through David to show His grace, and incidentally prove his point about David. Now the same thing is going to happen tonight, only tonight it is even more detailed about how God engineered the circumstances of Goliath.

To understand Goliath and the Philistines we have to go back centuries into history and get background on a very difficult historical question. You say why waste all this time with a historical background. Because if history is an outplaying of God’s plan, then the more we know of history the more we know of God. And the more you’re going to see how God is so very, very careful in how He engineers things, how God centuries and centuries before 1 Samuel 17, which is occurring around the vicinity of 1000 BC, but centuries and centuries, at least a thousand years before this, God in His omniscience knew what was going to happen. Remember God’s character. God is sovereign, God is righteous, God is just, God is love, and God is omniscient. Because God is omniscient it means that He foresees all things. He knows not only what is possible in history He knows what certainly will occur in history. And so God being omniscient looked forward 1000 years, from the time of Abraham, and set up history in such a way as to produce a very unique situation, one which you will miss if you do not see this background.

First we have to understand why God wanted the kind of man He wanted. He wanted certain qualities in His king. First, the king was to deliver Israel, that was the first thing, he was to take over from the judges. The second quality of the king was that he had to have a military victory. He had to have a military victory over God’s enemies, there could be no compromise. No kind of thing that we have in Vietnam or something, this had to be a crushing military defeat. That was the second thing that a king needed to do. Now we have an analogy that we’re going to develop between Israel and the Church. By looking at this analogy we can understand a little bit about this spiritual conflict between David and Goliath and how this applies to us as believers.

The first thing about Israel is number one, they were given a land as their possession. That was what God had graced them with. God had given them free the land; today we would say this was capital investment, God gave them capital for their capitalist production. The second thing, the counterpart to the land, is that God has given the Church a heavenly role. We don’t know the details of our role, but we have a fantastic role in the cosmos of the future. And the Church is being trained for that inheritance. We today do not experience our inheritance for our inheritance is not of this world. That being the case, then we have to watch how Israel dealt with the problem of the land. They were given a mandate to conquer, to conquer their possessions. The Church is likewise given a mandate to conquer, to conquer and in this sense to conquer the sin nature, our flesh, so that we may be qualified to act out our heavenly role for eternity. This is our command; in other words, build Christ in the heart.

Now occupying the land and preventing them from inheriting the land were the enemies, were the Gentile nations. The Gentile nations were the powers that opposed Israel. Now the powers that oppose the Christians are demons, Satan. So there’s an analogy between the enemies of the Old Testament and Satan and the demon hordes under him. And this is why we have holy war waged in the Old Testament; it is a just war; we have just wars today but they are not holy wars; holy war is another question that has to do with good and evil.

Now we come to verse 1 of chapter 17 and tonight we are going to skip around. “Now the Philistines gathered together their armies to battle, and were gathered together at Socoh, which belongs to Judah, and pitched [encamped] between Socoh and Azekah, in the Ephes-dammim.” That’s the valley of the blood. [2] “And Saul and the men of Israel were gathered together, and pitched by the valley of Elah, and set the battle in array against the Philistines.”

Now we meet these strange people called the Philistines. And we have to do some background in understanding who the Philistines were. The first thing about the Philistines is that is where the word Palestine comes from. Palestim is the Hebrew word for Philistine and you can see how from Palestim you get Palestine. So when you call the land the (quote) “Holy Land” Palestine you’re actually insulting the Jews because it’s named for the Philistines. And God does not call the land Palestine. God calls it Aretz Yisrael, the land of Israel. So the proper title is the land of Israel, not Palestine. But Palestine has come to be in our historical vocabulary the proper noun for the area yet it historically has come from the Philistines.

Who are the Philistines? No one knows exactly who the Philistines were because there is no language left. To this day there is no particular language that we can find that the Philistines spoke; we can’t find anything about their religion, don’t know what they worshipped except what’s taught in God’s area. So there is a large area of data that is missing on the Philistines. So obviously where there’s a vacuum there’s lots of speculations. In most areas the Philistines are equated with what you find in history called the “sea peoples.” The sea people were a group of races that came down and roamed around the eastern end of the Mediterranean between the years 1100 and 1200 BC. Now this is by classical chronology and I’ll have a few remarks to make about that.

But these people roamed around the eastern end of the Mediterranean and they were a group of warriors apparently aligned with the Greeks. Though they were not all Greeks and they landed in the northern part of the Nile Delta and began to invade Egypt. Egypt at the time was ruled by Ramses III; Ramses III conducted a defense against them and drove them back out to the sea, and he says later on they went over to the land of Patinue or over in Palestine. So you have these people leaving the area after being defeated by Ramses III, driven off from landing in Egypt and they came over here. Most people will tell you that the sea peoples are the Philistines of the Bible. This is the usual standard interpretation, even in conservative circles. This is the usual standard position, that they were a group of people, the Philistines were actually part of the sea peoples, they were made up of the [not familiar with word, sounds like: Dan een] which is a word used of the Greeks though it has a strange Jewish flavor to it also since the tribe of Dan is a Jewish tribe, and it had a number of other people, eight others plus the word which we get Philistines from.

And Ramses says when he fought these people they were made of a conglomerate of ten people that he fought and he has left us a historic record of this. The question is what date. By usual chronology it’s 1100 to 1200 BC. And it is usually inferred that the sea peoples were running around the eastern end of the Mediterranean after the Trojan Wars. After Troy fell, at least one time after it fell, you had these people out of all this collision between the Greeks and the Trojans you had these people stirred up all throughout the eastern end of the Mediterranean and these were related some way to the warriors of the Trojan Wars. And so the link is made from the Trojan War and Homer and The Iliad to the Philistines and down to Israel.

Now, the question however is that if the sea peoples that most scholars say are the Philistines, then we have a problem with God’s Word because the Philistines as mentioned as already being in the land at the time of Abraham. And they are already in the land by the time of the Exodus. And you can’t put the Exodus at 1100 BC. So we have problems and it doesn’t look like these sea peoples are the whole story. The Philistines go back far earlier than the sea peoples.

Now to see the Biblical position let’s go back to Genesis 10 and find out from whence cometh the Philistines. One of the exercises in our Sunday School literature will be an exercise given to everyone to find the son of Noah that you came from. Obviously we don’t have any illusions as to how accurate this is going to be but we do know from God’s Word in Genesis 10-11 where these sons of Noah spread to and if you can remember your family background back 4 or 5 generations you should be able to locate where your fore bearers came from and connecting the Genesis 10 account with this you may be able to deduce out of what son or grandson of Noah you came from.

Why do we do this? For one reason, we want to build in all of ourselves and our children a genealogical view of history; not a date view, not a date/time view. Dates can come and go, the issue is the heritage, your heritage, your race and your tribe. Each one of you comes, according to God’s Word, out of a particular tribal lineage, and many things can be explained in your personal history if you are aware of your own tribal background and where you came from and how in history you arrived where you are. It will describe also the character of your sin nature and why you have a certain sin nature and why it’s patterned in the way it is. We’re simply trying point people to the racial genealogical concept of history. This is why the Bible is filled with genealogies, not dates, genealogies, so and so the son of so and so the son of so and so the son of so and so. Why all that? To give you your heritage, your racial heritage under the fifth divine institution.

Now we go back in Genesis 10:6 and one of the three sons of Noah was Ham. Ham had a son, Mizraim, is the word for Egypt and it is the Hebrew word used for Egypt. So out of the sons of Noah we have the second generation, Mizraim. That’s the first thing. Now if you look in verse 13 it says “Mizraim begot Ludim, and Ananim, and Lehabim, and Naphtuhim, [14] Parthrusim, and Casluhim, (out of whom came the Philistines) and Caphtorim.” There are three words in verse 14 that you want to know. The first one is Casluhim, he is a grandson of Ham. His brother also listed in verse 14 is Caphtorim. Now those are the two grandsons of Ham and Casluhim and Caphtorim both were close in history and they both gravitated to either one of two places and it’s hard to tell, Crete or Cyprus. There’s a debate on where but these are islands in the Mediterranean. Both of these men build civilizations on those islands. Please notice at this point, they are not Greeks. Greeks are a race from Japheth and they have an utterly different historical concept behind them. These are Hamites, not Japhetic, though they become intermingled with the Greeks they are still Hamites, they are Hamitic peoples. And you’ll notice in parenthesis in verse 14 of Genesis 10 teaches us that the Philistines came out of Casluhim. So we have the proper lineage and they are not Greeks, they are Hamitics. So here’s the Biblical position, you can take it or leave it but the point is if we’re going to be true to God’s Word we have the Philistines here. And they come out of Casluhim.

Now the second step, we’re going to leave the Philistines a moment, we’ve covered one point so far and that is that the Philistines are Hamites, that they are coming out of Casluhim and they are associated with Caphtorim and they either went to Crete or Cyprus. That’s the first thing.

Now because we’re going to deal with Goliath we’ve got to give you something else, so the second point is found in Genesis 14:5. For a while we’re going to forego discussing the Philistines but I’ll get back to them. “And in the fourteenth year came Chedorlaomer,” this is Abraham’s day, that is around 2000 BC, then in the rest of verse 5 a group of peoples that lived in Palestine at the time of Abraham are given. They being with the Rephaims; that is a strange civilization and we’re going to see how God used these people and out of whom come Goliath. Goliath comes from the Rephaims. And he has a long tribal heritage in history and you have to understand how these two threads, one thread I’m weaving tonight is the Philistines, the other thread I’m weaving is the background of Goliath and the two are going to crisscross when they meet David. But God took centuries and centuries and centuries of history to set up the situation that you’re going to see with David and Goliath.

So the Rephaim come to the Holy Land and they are called by three names. Here’s the Dead Sea, here’s the Sea of Galilee and one group settles just east and south of the Sea of Galilee and they are called the Rephaim, though the Rephaim is the common noun, it refers to the whole group, the group that settled just southwest of the Sea of Galilee in ancient, ancient, ancient times, that is Abraham’s day, before any conquest occurred, were the Rephaim. They were a race of giants. And the Rephaim down through history, and I don’t mean just the northern group, all three groups were giants; they were fantastically tall men and we’ll see more and more evidence of this as time goes on. That’s the northern component.

There’s a river just off the area here called the Arnon; south of the Arnon River they were known as the Zanzummims, that is the same group of people going under a different name, it is a sub tribe of the original. Then to the far south they were known as Emim. Now these are the three sub groups of the Rephaim. They were a group of physical freaks, a large group, strong and powerful and we can infer from Scripture had one of the most apostate religions known to man. They out-Canaanites the Canaanites, because the Canaanites are the ones that God used to conquer these people in history and I’ll show you that in a moment. But these are a group of large, powerful strong people who became religiously polluted in their culture and God excised them from history.

This is a law of history which we might pause on a footnote here.

Whenever a civilization goes on negative volition in history for which God has not promised a destiny prophetically, God eliminates that civilization from history and God will use bloody war to do it or He will use natural disasters but God has a love for the human race that you and I may at times rebel against but God loves us and He wants us to go on and have an opportunity to believe His Word, and if God allowed the foul and polluted civilizations to exist in history they would so contaminate the stream of humanity that man would be rendered unsaveable. Therefore there have been strange movements in history that had as their objective the annihilation of apostate society. I’m sure this isn’t going to settle with sociological majors or their teachers because everything you learn in sociology today is based on relativism but the Bible is based on absolutism and there’s an absolute right and an absolute standard by which all societies are judged. And these people fail.

Now if you’ll turn to Deuteronomy 2:10 we’ll see just how God eliminated these apostate societies. It goes back to the Abrahamic Covenant. God promised Abraham blessing, and it said “In thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” That blessing directly flows through Abraham’s grandson, Jacob or the chiseler. And out of him some the twelve tribes. That is the narrow line of the Abrahamic blessing. But here’s the fantastic thing about history. It appears from the glimpses that we have in God’s Word that God not only blessed the humanity down through Jacob but God blessed humanity by the people who were associated with Abraham, such as Lot, and out of Lot we have Moab; Moab is partially related to Abraham. He is not in the direct line of Jacob and he is not the recipient of the great promises, except God’s blessing to Abraham overflowed into other members of Abraham’s own family.

So in Deuteronomy 2:9, “And the LORD said unto me,” that’s Moses, the situation here is the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea and the Jordan River, Moses has moved the whole nation up into the Transjordania area; he is about to make an eastern type penetration; he failed 40 years before to make a southern penetration and now he’s going to come along the Jordan River on the east and move in from that way. That by the way is why Israel to this day will never give up the West Bank of Jordan; Israel knows military history and they know what happens whenever you have an enemy in Transjordania. You cannot hold Palestine with another force holding Transjordania. And no Israeli general in his right mind will ever give up the West Bank of Jordan and you can look for intrusions by Israel to help secure themselves on their eastern flank. They know that this is the weakest because this is how Joshua conquered the land.

So Moses is coming up the east side and he has some blocking civilizations here, one is Moab. And he was given certain instructions by God, verse 9. “And the LORD said unto me, Distress not the Moabites, neither contend with them in battle; for I will not give thee of their land for a possession, because I have given Ar unto the children of Lot for a possession.” God is saying that Moab has the right to this because the Moabites gained it by His sovereign will. So he says in verse 10, “The Emim dwelt therein in times past, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim. [11] Who also were accounted giants” or the Rephaim, “as the Anakim; but the Moabites call them the Emim.” And so this was the group of that ancient civilization, the southern part of the Rephaim that Moab conquered.

So immediately then we find an interesting thing that Abraham’s immediate family were the means of freeing humanity by destroying apostate civilizations, and the first apostate civilization to go down was the southern wing of the Rephaim under the Moabites. That’s the first part of their conquest.

Now Deuteronomy 2:19-20. And when you come against the children of Ammon” and Ammon was the next civilization in Transjordania, that shouldn’t strike you as too unusual, the capital of Jordan today is Amman, so the Biblical name is still there. And Ammon is the second group that conquered the Rephaim. Notice in verse 19, “And when you come near over against the children of Ammon, distress them not, nor meddle with them; for I will not give thee of the land of the children of Ammon any possession, because I have given it unto the children of Lot for a possession.” That was also counted the land of the Rephaim, or giants. The Rephaim dwelt there in old times and the Ammonites called them the Zanzummims. So here is another group of this mysterious group called the Rephaim; the Ammonites clobbered and destroyed them.

Now in Deuteronomy 3:11 we find the rest of the Rephaim are going to be destroyed by Israel. So the first two groups of the Rephaim were destroyed by Lot’s children, Moab and Ammon and the third group is now going to be destroyed by Moses. In fact, by the time Moses leads his army up into Transjordania, at this time in history, there’s really only of the Rephaim still alive. And one of these men’s name is Og, Deuteronomy 3:11, “For only Og, king of Bashan, remained of the remnant of the giants;” so Og then is a great king and you notice his bed; Og was a strong man and he needed a strong bed and so he had a bed made of iron, by the way notice, not bronze age, they’re using iron here, “behold his bedstead was a bedstead of iron. Is it not in Rabbah of the children of Ammon? Nine cubits was the length thereof, and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.” A cubit is a foot and a half. So 9 times 1½ is 13½ feet, that’s how big his bed was, obviously showing how big he was. And I want you to notice one of these small little notices in God’s Word before you get too skeptical, do you notice that Moses anticipated people would be skeptical, so what did he say. He said “Is it not in Rabbah of the children of Ammon,” in other words, he said they have a museum over there in Ammon and if you don’t believe what I’m telling you, you go on over and see it. If you doubt the evidence check it out. So he says there’s a bedstead over there 13½ feet tall.

Now we have extra Biblical evidences of what this guy Og looked like. One of the extra Biblical traditions says that when Moses marched his armies out there they came across the city and Og was inside, and evidently Og was peeking over the wall or something, he didn’t come out one day and so the Israelites camped, they had never seen Og before, they knew he was in the city and he camped one night and Moses woke up early one morning and walked out there and he started looking over at the city and he noticed the city wall looked a little different and he got to looking at it, it looked like there was an extra tower. And he couldn’t figure out how these people had built a tower on top of the wall overnight. And the extra Biblical tradition, of course an exaggeration but nevertheless has, I think a kernel of historical truth behind it, and that was that Og was just sitting there dangling his feet over the wall, waiting for the Israelite armies to come get him. So Og was a tremendous giant bigger than Goliath; Goliath is a Tiny Tim by comparison, Goliath is only nine feet six inches tall and this man is about 13 feet tall. So you can see Goliath was tiny and he was the last of the line. But this is the strange group of people that was there.

Now we also have one other element of the Rephaim. So far I’ve shown you those in Transjordania, made up of three groups, the Emim, the Zanzummims and the Rephaim. Now there were some others who had come on over after Abraham left at a place called Hebron. And these people we call the Anakim. That’s the last group of them, the Anakim. Turn to Deut. 1:28. Now the Anakim are the ones that scared the spies, Joshua and Caleb weren’t scared, but notice what they say in verse 28, “Why shall we go up? Our brethren have discouraged our heart, saying, The people are greater and taller than we; the cities are great and walled up to heaven; and, moreover, we have seen the sons of the Anakim there.” And this is a large group of super race that existed in Hebron also.

Now Joshua was one of the two spies that didn’t panic when he saw them, he realized that if God was with them He could kill them too, so therefore Joshua conquered them and we read of Joshua’s conquest of the fourth and last group of the Rephaim in Joshua 11:22, and here we join the Philistines. Joshua came into the land, please notice how God is gracious to the human race through the Jews and through Abraham’s family. You see, this race had to be eliminated and God selected the family of Abraham to eliminate them. And the Bible is very careful to let you know that those who were over east of Jordan were eliminated by Lot’s children, Moab and Ammon. And King Og, the last one, was eliminated by Moses. Moses died and never crossed the Jordan River, he died east of the Jordan River and he sent Joshua into the land and Joshua had a three-fold conquest, he secured a central beachhead and then he moved south and then he moved north; one, two, three. And that’s how Joshua conquered the land.

And when he moved south in the second phase of his campaign he struck at Hebron, and he broke up this group of the Rephaim that were there and Joshua 11:22 we find the final statement of Joshua’s conquest. “There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the children of Israel; only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod, there remained some.” Now those cities should be familiar with you because the Philistines had five cities along the southwestern area, here’s the southern end of the Dead Sea, the Philistines had five cities along there and these are three of them. Ashdod was one famous city, we’ve already encountered that numerous times, and Gaza and Gath. So here you have these three cities of the pentapolis.

So where do we find then the last survivors of this super race? They are in Philistia. If that’s the case, who then do you suppose, to be consistent with history, to be consistent with history what people will God use to destroy the super race? Abraham’s family. And here you begin to set up and this was why David must kill Goliath. And not only must David kill Goliath but the Jews must exterminate all four of his brothers. And we’ll be introduced to them shortly. But notice this, from 2000 BC, at least by 2000 the super race was there, all the way down to 1000 BC, for one thousand years of history this race God said will be destroyed and I choose Abraham’s family to do destroy it. So hundreds of years passed but God’s decree remained and this decree worked itself out in a historical military victory.

Now how did the Philistines get here? What about these Philistines; we’ve got the Rephaim and their survivors now down in Philistia and they’re mixing and intermingling and intermarrying but we still have to now go back to the Philistines. We left them on Crete and Cyprus. Now how did they get off Crete and Cyprus. Turn to Amos 9:7, in Amos 9:7 God speaks about what He has done in history. “Are you not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? Saith the LORD. Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt? And the Philistines from Caphtor,” remember the two sons, Casluhim and Caphtorim. “Caphtor” is either Crete or Cyprus. And God brought the Philistines from Crete or Cyprus to the eastern end of the Mediterranean and small groups of these people settled there by the time Abraham came into the land, we know this because in Genesis 21 and Genesis 26 both Abraham and Isaac made pacts with them, they made treaties with the early Philistines, Abimelech the king; remember Abimelech, he was the king of the Philistine colony that existed there. So the Philistines have a colony there long before any Trojan War and long before any sea peoples.

But that was 2000 BC. Now the Jews go in 1800 BC down to Egypt and stay until 1400 BC so we have a 400 year span of history during which the Jews expand from a family of twelve sons under Jacob all the way up to a million men or more. So there’s a tremendous multiplication, they beat the rabbits in Australia for reproduction. And they grew to be a strong nation during the 400 years of captivity. By the way, another sign, you cannot erase the Jew from history. The more the Egyptians would try to destroy them the faster they would reproduce. And this is what scared the Egyptians, the Jews weren’t just some little tribe, they were a large group of people. So now in Genesis 21:26 we have a covenant made with them and after that in Exodus 13:17 we have the situation of Palestine and the Philistines as it occurred in the day of the Exodus, 1400 BC, some 400 years later.

At this point the Philistines are not just a small group of people, they are a large group. And so in Exodus 13:17 it says, “Now it came to pass when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines, though that was near; for God said lest per adventure the people repent when they see war and return to Egypt.” So by the time of the Exodus God could have moved His people along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean but He didn’t. He chose instead to move His people way to the south and then come back up and make a southern penetration. So the reason given is because of the power of the Philistine culture by 1400 BC.

Another evidence that the Philistine culture was very powerful at this time is in Exodus 23:31. When God speaks to Israel and promises them the geographical boundaries of the land and their international sphere of control, He outlines it and then He has a word for the Mediterranean Sea that’s very interesting. “I will set thy bounds from the Red Sea, even unto the Sea of the Philistines,” the Sea of the Philistines was the Mediterranean Sea which teaches us that the Philistine civilization was so powerful that it dominated the eastern end of the Mediterranean. As Amalek controlled the land the Philistines controlled the sea. And this is why the Philistine colonies in the pentapolis is always powerful, they were always a military threat because they could be easily supplied from the sea. So the Philistines roamed the eastern end of the Mediterranean and they were a great sea people. They probably did partake of the later raids in Egypt.

If we follow the chronology that is being experimented on with Velikovsky and by the way, Velikovsky is increasingly being recognized by the scholarly world, but Velikovsky is in his chronology developing a system where in 1400 BC you have the Exodus; at that time going on down through history you have a major crisis then, and then around 700 BC you have another crisis. The Trojan War occurred in 700 BC, very late; most scholars put it at 1100 BC. He pushes it way down to 700 BC. And out of the Trojan Wars did come the sea peoples and that all is true, it’s just misdated. And it’s brought down very late in history and the Philistines were still are a power in the eastern Mediterranean and still were part of the sea peoples. But the Philistines as their own culture preceded the raids that were repulsed by Ramses III.

Now, what is the importance of this. I’m giving you this history so you can see who was borrowing from who because there’s one word in the Goliath and David incident that hinges… the whole interpretation hinges on how you take this chronology, whether you place the Trojan War after it or before it. We’re placing the Trojan War after the time of David. David’s here, 1000 BC, David and Goliath. So the Trojan Wars and everything following from them occur after it. Now the Philistines control the sea and gradually control many of the lands. Saul failed twice in routing them. In 1 Samuel 13 remember Saul’s first failure. Remember what happened in verse 5, this is something also characteristic of the Philistines. They were specialists in psychological warfare. They terrorized their opposition. And so in verse 5 “And the Philistines gathered themselves together to fight with Israel, three thousand chariots and six thousand horsemen,” and remember I said that that weapon was absolutely useless, you can’t use chariots as an effective weapon in the hill country. But they brought the chariots along to terrify the Jews. And Saul, because he couldn’t relax in the promises of God, he blew it, his army panicked and he lost his army at the first encounter. So 1 Samuel 13 was Saul’s first failure and he failed to engage the Philistines properly.

In 1 Samuel 14 was the time of Saul’s second failure, and at that time he had the entire Philistine force on his land and he could have destroyed them, just like he later on destroyed Amalek. Amalek was the scourge of the ancient east. If the Amalek are the Hyksos they were a fierce people and the credit for their extinction goes to a Jew by the name of Saul. Saul was the man who freed the ancient east from the dark ages by his destruction of the city of Amalek. God had said to Saul, Saul you could be a total hero because you can free the whole eastern end of the Mediterranean. Just think of it, Saul can destroy Amalek down here by destroying the city of Amalek and he can destroy the Philistines and if he destroys the Philistines at one swoop, Saul has opened up the entire eastern Mediterranean for a renaissance. So a large amount of history hangs on what Saul is going to do and he goofs it twice.

Now comes the third encounter with the Philistines, 1 Samuel 17. Keep in mind the previous failures. “Now the Philistines gathered together their armies to battle, and were gathered together at Socoh,” this is a valley which is dry in the summertime. Here’s the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, here’s the valley of Elah, and here are the two places mentioned in verse 1-2; they’re either side of this valley area. “which belongs to Judah, and encamped between Socoh and Azekah,” Azekah is on the north side, and Socoh is on the south side. The armies are watching each other; Saul’s army is gathered in one place and the Philistine army is gathered in another place. They set their armies in battle array, that’s what it means they were “gathered together” in verse 2, but another interesting thing about verse 1, “the Philistines gathered together their armies,” plural; that means that they had several armies that they gathered together from the pentapolis. Each city would put out so many thousand troops and so each city had their own army. And they “gathered all these armies together;” this was a military formation, it had a lot of military activity from maneuvers associated with it. [2] “And Saul and the men of Israel were gathered together, and encamped by the valley of Elah, and set the battle in array against the Philistines. [3] And the Philistines stood on a mountain on the one side, and Israel stood on a mountain on the other side, with a valley between them.”

And we could add, there were centuries of historical questions also in between them. If they would be successful, the eastern Mediterranean would be freed from the yoke of tyranny. The powerful Philistine civilization would be smashed if Saul can manage it. Verse 4, “And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, of Gath, whose height was six cubits and a span.” remember where we said the Anakim went? They went to Gath. Goliath is a man who has the genes of this race who intermarried with the Philistines. He is a Philistine but only half Philistine, he is part Philistine and part Anakim. And that is Goliath’s background. To prove this we can go to other passages in God’s Word, 2 Samuel 21, 1 Chronicles 20, and find the name of his brothers. All of his brothers were giants too, Goliath was only one of a family of giants. It would have been fun to see what these guys did for sports. They had give and I bet they had the best basketball team going. One of the names was Ishbibenob, that was one of the brothers; another one was Saph, that’s the next one, that is the third person in the family, sometimes he is known in Scripture as Sipppai, then Lahmi, that was another one, and another one we don’t have his name so we’ll just call him Mr. X and he’s distinguished by the fact that he had six fingers and six toes. So you can see these are genetic freaks; the Anakim have something wrong with their genes and whatever it is it tends toward giantism. And the people are very strong warriors.

So there’s a whole family here and this particular member is Goliath that comes out. Here is the very vital word and this is the word that the whole passage hangs on. Verse 4, “And there went out a champion out of the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath…. The word that is translated in your Bibles as the “champion,” the word in the Hebrew looks like this: it’s ish, which is the word for man, and then there’s a word after it, ha benaym and this is the word which means the middle, and it is brought over and translated in the Greek, in Classical Greek for the space between two armies. And so here we have a man who stands between two armies, and he came to be known as the “champion.”

Those of you who have studied classical literature should begin to see something here that’s interesting. The way Goliath challenges Israel is exactly the way in Homer’s Iliad the Greeks and the Trojans collide. When Menelaus of the Greeks, who was a man who was married to Helen, and the Trojans took his wife, stole her, Paris, the son of Priam stole his wife and that set off the Trojan war, Menelaus comes and he challenges Paris. And they do it by… the Trojan army backs off, they’ve been fighting for a while, the Trojans back off and the Greeks back off and they say look, we’ve got enough people dying in this war, so what we will do, instead of fighting any longer, we’ll just let Menelaus go after Paris and settle it, and may the best man win, and he has Helen. Helen was reputed to be the most beautiful woman in the ancient world. So two armies fought over her and two civilizations were at stake for this woman. They should have just dumper her in the Aegean Sea. But anyway, you have Menelaus and he comes out and he fights Paris, and the results are inconclusive and it goes on and on, Homer weavers a very interesting story. But in the same book, The Iliad, another thing occurs between Achilles and Hector; you have an identical situation where two great warriors come face to face.

Now remember what I said about the Trojan Wars, the whole style of Homer is the collision of the man of the middle. That is the style of fighting here, and it is that style, also repeated in Virgil’s Aneus, also repeated in Aeschylus Seven against Thebes, in these great classic works this is a commonly seen style of fighting. It is that style that Goliath is using here. When he walks out in verse 4 he is walking out as the Greek warriors would have walked out. Now most people would say see, Goliath is borrowing and following out his Greek heritage. I say no he is not; my point is if you reverse the chronology it is the Greeks who are copying Goliath’s strategy. Remember the Philistines are not Greeks, the Philistines are Hamites and apparently as the Greeks borrowed much from Egypt, they apparently borrowed a style of fighting that we meet with here. And so you have Goliath who is the first classical warrior, and he comes out and he challenges. And this is why it creates such a thing.

In verse 5-6 we have his armor described. “And he had an helmet of bronze upon his head,” notice all the defensive armor is bronze but the offensive armor is iron. Notice verse 5, the helmet is of bronze, that’s defense. “…and he was armed with a coat of mail; and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of bronze.” Now much is that? Five thousand shekels of bronze; there are twelve grams to a shekel, that’s 60,000 grams or 60 kilograms, which is about 132 pounds. That’s how much his armor weighed. Now how do the Jews know how much his armor weighed? Because after David killed him he said, hey, I’d like that in private museum, and so he cut the armor off Goliath and they weighed it. And also please notice in verse 4 at the end, “his height was six cubits;” a cubit is a foot and a half, that’s nine and a half feet, “and a span,” a span is between your thumb and little finger, so say six to nine inches, so you add nine feet and six or nine inches, that’s how tall Goliath was. He was strong enough to carry about 132 pounds of armor. If you’ve ever carried cement bags around you know how much 100 pounds weigh. Well this man was 132 pounds in just his armor.

Then verse 6, “And he had greaves of brass [shin armor of bronze] upon his legs,” also Greek style armor, “and a target of brass [javelin of bronze] between his shoulders,” it’s not a target, it’s a javelin, Greek type weapon used in Homer. Verse 7, “And the staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam;” in other words, he could probably put a hole through any fortress by throwing this thing, “and his spear’s head weighed six hundred shekels of iron,” about sixteen pounds, that’s a heavy shot-put, and that was the end of his spear, so you can imagine a shot-put put on the end of a four or five inch diameter tube and you’re holding this thing out with one hand and you’re going to heave it at somebody. So needless to say this is the kind of thing that, shall we say, terrified the Israelites.

But that’s not all, in verse 8, this is what angers God and why Goliath is going to come to a screeching halt. Verse 8, “And he stood and cried unto the armies of Israel,” and he’d do this day after day, this is not a one-shot thing because the verb back in verse 4 where it says “there went out a champion” is in the imperfect habitual tense, meaning he did this day after day. If you look at verse 16 it tells you he did it for forty days, time of testing notice; for forty days, every single day he’d come on out and say hey big boys, you got somebody to come out and fight me. So this went on and on and on. And so in verse 8 here’s what he used to say; each day he would say this. “…and said unto them, Why are ye come out to set your battle in array? Am not I a Philistine, and you servants to Saul? [Choose you a man for you, and let him come down to me.]” See, it’s sarcasm directed at the rise of the monarchy because remember the Philistine spy system has been very upset over developments in Israel. They remember the good old times when they had the judges and the Philistines do not like the centralization of power that’s occurring in the king. So obviously they single Saul out for ridicule; they hey you guys, I’m a Philistine, I’m free and you guys are up in the hills and you’re Saul’s slave, by the way, ragtags, why don’t you come out in battle array? See this is sarcasm and it’s ridicule of the armies of the living God. Now David is going to get burned up by this and he’s going to do something about it but you’ve got to understand what is happening; there’s a theological insult thrown at the armies of Israel.

Verse 9, “If he be able to fight with me, and to kill me, then will we be your servants; but if I prevail against him, and kill him, then ye shall be our servants, and serve us. [10] And the Philistine said,” and here’s where he got in trouble; this is typical of a person like Goliath. You will meet Goliath’s in your experience, and they are the big push people and every time, up to some crucial time, they’ve always been able to mouth their way around, push their way around and just force their will on other people. They’re bullies and the only language that a bully ever understands is to get clobbered good. That’s the only way to deal with it, you cannot reason with a bully, you just have to clobber him, that’s all; beat them up good. The best way for kids to deal with a bully is just gang up on him some day after school and just clobber him. And when you’re finished with that then you won’t have any more trouble; after that you’ll be free of the mess. And bullies always have a fatal flaw, and bullies will always bully the wrong person. And here Goliath… up to this point he’s on safe ground as far as God is concerned, because God is probably saying the same thing about the armies of Israel, how did they ever get together down there. So up to this point he has God’s agreement.

But now when he comes to verse 10 it’s a very different story, and this is the verse that will set us up for next week with David. “And the Philistine said, I defy the armies of Israel this day; give me a man, that we may fight together.” When he uses the word “defy” it is a special verb that means he is laughing at God Himself. He is defying God Himself at this point, not just the culture of Israel but the God of that culture. And so when he defies this point he is in hot water now. And God is going to work in a very marvelous way through David.

But the point you want to see is that going back to our introduction tonight, what is this? The Philistines are pictures of a satanic attack. Satan is a bully-boy, he is the original bully. And he is the one who is defying the Church of Jesus Christ. And you know what God is looking for; He’s looking for David’s, who will answer the challenge and stop crying about it and stop whining and stop bellyaching but believers who will take up the challenge and kill him, destroy his work. That is the aggressive role that God calls the believer to do.

Verse 11, “When Saul and all Israel heard those words of the Philistine, they were dismayed, and greatly afraid.” One final comment, the verb “dismay” is a word used always in the Hebrew, or most of the time in the Hebrew in the Old Testament to mean the basis of my faith has collapsed. The word “dismay” is used when the false prophets prophesies fail and therefore his faith in his God also fails. So the word “dismay” means that Saul at this point has lost the ability to believe. We saw before he had the ability to believe a little bit and lost it at crisis, at this point Saul just throws in the towel. And so what you have set up for, that God has spent ten centuries of history engineering the right mixture between the Philistines and the Anakim blood to produce a Philistine Anakim by the name of Goliath who will say precisely the right thing at precisely the right case under precisely the right condition. And God is now going to turn this thing around and something fantastic is going to come out of this because this provides David, the believer who is ready for the day of challenge, it provides him the opportunity to show what he’s made out of. With our heads bowed….