What did goliath look like?

Answer 1

1Samuel says Goliath's height was six cubits and a span while the Greek translation (Septuagint) says he was four cubits and a span. While the length of a cubit is not precisely known, there is a general consensus that a cubit is measured from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. Thus, a cubit is somewhere around eighteen inches, plus or minus 10 percent. And a span is approximately nine inches (half the length of a cubit). The Samuel scroll from Qumran, which is in Hebrew, reads the same as the Greek version (6'6"). This implies that the Hebrew from which the Greek translator was working also said that Goliath was "six feet six inches rather than nearly ten feet tall." The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm both the Greek Septuagint and Josephus' Antiquities,the corruption resides in the extant Hebrew. The findings at Qumran suggest that the seemingly impossible height of Goliath (over nine feet tall) resulted from a corruption of the original version of 1 Samuel.

Answer 2

According to the Dead Sea Scrolls and earlier 4th century Septuagint (Greek) text of Samuel, gives the height of Goliath as "four cubits and a span" (approximately 200 centimeters or about 6.5 feet).

Later Septuagint manuscripts and the oldest Masoretic texts (Aleppo Codex, 10 AD) increase his height to "six cubits and a span," which would make him about 290 cm or nine and a half feet tall.

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Some claim that Goliath was much taller (upwards of 13 feet tall) because they claim that humans were larger back then, and so a cubit (the distance from the forearm to the fingertips) would have been larger too, before it was standardized. Although it should be noted that archaeological evidence has determined a man's average height during biblical times was around 5.5 feet.

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1 Samuel 17:4 states that Goliath was over nine feet tall.

Some versions of The Bible state Goliath was "six cubits and a span". Six cubits convert to 2.74 metres (8.9 feet), and a span, which was another 0.23 m (0.75 feet).

However, there is some evidence to suggest Goliath was between 6' 7" and 6' 9". Some sources say this is according to the Dead Sea Scrolls which date from 100 BC, the Historian Flavius Josephus 100 AD, and the oldest version of the Greek Bible (LXX) which was first translated from Hebrew to Greek in the 200s BC.

1 Samuel says Goliath's height was six cubits and a span while the Greek translation (Septuagint) says he was four cubits and a span. While the length of a cubit is not precisely known, there is a general consensus that a cubit is measured from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger. Thus, a cubit is somewhere around eighteen inches, plus or minus 10 percent. And a span is approximately nine inches (half the length of a cubit). The Samuel scroll from Qumran, which is in Hebrew, reads the same as the Greek version (6'6"). This implies that the Hebrew from which the Greek translator was working also said that Goliath was "six feet six inches rather than nearly ten feet tall." The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm both the Greek Septuagint and Josephus' Antiquities,the corruption resides in the extant Hebrew. The findings at Qumran suggest that the seemingly impossible height of Goliath (over nine feet tall) resulted from a corruption of the original version of 1 Samuel.

Answer 3

Goliath was a man, he was of unusual height, but otherwise would have looked like any other man.