FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS
“And the shaft of his spear was like a weaver’s beam” (I Sam 17:6-7): Weaponry, Weaving, and Broken Similes in the Duel between David and Goliath
Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2024-2025 season on October 23, 2024, at 7:00 pm EDT, presented by Prof. Laura Mazow. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.
“You come to me with sword and spear and javelin; but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel…” declares David. Having previously rebuffed the loan of King Saul’s armor, David advances against Goliath armed only with a sling shot and five smooth stones. Goliath, on the other hand, is in full battle gear. His armament is described in meticulous detail: bronze helmet, coat of mail and greaves, a javelin between his shoulders, and a spear, whose “shaft… was like a weaver’s beam” and whose head “weighed six hundred shekels of iron…” (I Sam 17:7).
There are two questions that arise, however, when examining Goliath’s weaponry, especially within the context of the rest of the story. The first is, where is the sword in this description—the one that David will use to behead Goliath and which is later given to David by the priest Ahimelech that is “like no other” (I Sam 21: 9)? The second asks, what is a weaver’s beam and what is the meaning of the simile comparing it to a spear? Yadin’s suggestion that the simile referenced a thonged javelin is awkward and doesn’t provide an answer to the missing sword.
Alternatively, Prof. Mazow proposes that Goliath’s sword was an Aegean or Anatolian long sword, a “cut-and-thrust” tool that could be used to both pierce Goliath’s armor and cut off his head. The narrator, describing an instrument unknown in the Israelite weapons inventory, compared Goliath’s sword to a weaver’s sword: a blade-shaped tool used to beat in the weft. Eventually neither the weaver’s tool nor the Philistine’s weapon could be conceived, and the description comes down to us as a spear-like weapon with a shaft that resembled a type of weaving tool, a broken simile that no longer described the shape and size of the foreign object.
Reconstructing Goliath’s martial outfitting has raised issues about the historicity of the textual narrative and the veracity of its details that have been engaged in debates on Goliath’s ethnicity and the dating of this text. Rather than reading Goliath’s weaponry as either historically inaccurate or so eclectic that it is unrepresentative of time and place, this proposal contextualizes the narrative details within an historical framework and reveals the dynamism of the textual transmission process.
Laura Mazow is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of Anthropology at East Carolina University. She received her BA in History from Georgetown University, and her MA and PhD in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona with a dissertation based on data from the Iron Age Philistine site of Tel Miqne-Ekron.
Laura has excavated at sites in Israel and Jordan, including Beth-Shean, Ashkelon, Gilat, Khirbet Iskander, Megiddo and Tel Miqne-Ekron. Her professional research interests include the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean, and North Africa, with a particular focus on the study of ancient weaving and wool processing tools and technologies. Laura’s recent publications include: “Why all Tubs are not Bathtubs,” Biblical Archaeological Review, Spring 2023: 16–18 and (forthcoming), “Ill-weav’d ambition, how much art thou shrunk! Re-examining ‘At the Fullers’ UET 6/2, 414 (Old Babylonian) as a Dialogue Between Weaver and Fuller.” She leads an ongoing collaborative project to investigate the function of ancient “bathtubs.” Were they used for bathing, burial, or textile production?
