Canter Bridge

Fittingly, the young David makes his debut in a pose that is both small and audacious. A strong instinct visible among Jewish interpreters sees in such personalities the story of Israel writ tiny and personalized yet with suggestive prescience.

Little Israel is at it again, rank to rank arrayed against the mighty Philistines who seem in every way to tower head and shoulders, invincible and mocking, over Israel the dwarf people. Perhaps the giant Goliath, too, is a nation’s story writ personalized—large this time—and with remarkable prescience.

Israel has no hope in the normal calculus of things. She will be overrun by the land’s strong denizens who have more than once before been tagged as invincible, outsized, the stuff of legend.

Little David, audaciously and instinctively claiming a mission larger than the one granted him by the father who summoned him to deliver a care package to his brothers on the seasonal frontline of conflict between the upstart Israelites and the incumbent Philistia, shod gorgeously with iron and glinting with less lethal metals. David wants a fight, not this hunkered-down humiliation that depends too much on head counts and an arsenal’s well-counted inventory.

David sees the Philistine’s penchant for mocking little Israel and its peripatetic god as the main fact on the ground and every reason to throw life and limb at the cursing swarthiness that stands before Israel’s pathetic tremblers. David’s optics win him no praise from his own. The conventional calculus forswears emotion in order to preserve life.

The text creates a virtual parable of Israel’s eternal struggle in having David discard every shield and helmet that fits and protects other men. He goes it alone, by any ordinary calculus, yet in literary response to Saul’s burnt-out, muttered well-wishing, YHWH indeed goes with David.

Thus did David slay Goliath, as millions of people who’ve never held a Bible still allude, claiming for this parable a scope that outranges little Israel’s destiny and fits uncomfortably upon jostling, secular nations.

Long preoccupied with the taunting of YHWH and his ranks, the text cannot conclude without allowing David a chance to be clear about what’s at stake.

You come against me with sword and spear and javelin …

… David shouts to the uncircumcised giant …

… but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, who you have defied.

Some time later, as the Bible might narrate in its careless attitude towards the passing of time when real continuities are at work, Jesus’ disciples asked him how they ought to address their maker. Jesus indulged them.

‘Father, hallowed be your name’, he began.

He was, after all, a son of David.