i wanted to tell a story that really obsessed me when i was writing my new book and it 's a story of something that happened
ancient palestine had a along its eastern border there 's a mountain range still same is true of israel today and in the mountain range are all of the ancient cities of that region
so jerusalem bethlehem hebron and then there 's a coastal plain along the mediterranean where tel aviv is now
and connecting the mountain range with the coastal plain is an area called the shephelah
which is a series of valleys and ridges that run east to west and you can follow the shephelah go through the shephelah to get from the coastal plain to the mountains and the shephelah if you 've been to israel you 'll know it 's just about the most beautiful part of israel it 's gorgeous with
forests of oak and wheat fields and vineyards but more importantly though in the history of that region it 's served it 's had a real strategic function
and that is it is the means by which hostile armies on the coastal plain find their way get up into the mountains and threaten those living in the mountains and three thousand years ago that 's exactly what happens
the philistines who are the biggest of enemies of the kingdom of israel are living in the coastal plain they 're originally from crete they 're a seafaring people
and they may start to make their way through one of the valleys of the shephelah up into the mountains because what they want to do is occupy the highland area right by bethlehem and split the kingdom of israel in two
and the kingdom of israel which is headed by king saul obviously catches wind of this and saul brings his army down from the mountains and he confronts the philistines in the valley of elah one of the most beautiful of the valleys of the shephelah
and the israelites dig in along the northern ridge and the philistines dig in along the southern ridge and the two armies just sit there for weeks and stare at each other because they 're deadlocked
neither can attack the other because to attack the other side you 've got to come down the mountain into the valley and then up the other side and you 're completely exposed
so finally to break the deadlock the philistines send their mightiest warrior
down into the valley floor and he calls out and he says to the israelites send your mightiest warrior down
this was a tradition in ancient warfare called single combat it was a way of settling disputes without incurring the bloodshed of a major battle and the philistine who is sent down their mightywarrior is a giant he 's six foot nine
he 's outfitted head to toe in this glittering bronze armor
and finally the only person who will come forward is this young shepherd boy and he goes up to saul and he says i 'll fight him and saul says you can 't fight him that 's ridiculous you 're this kid this is this mighty warrior
but the shepherd is adamant he says no no no you don 't understand i have been defending my flock against lions and wolves for years i think i can do it and saul has no choice he 's got no one else who 's come forward so he says all right and then he turns to the kid and he says but you 've got to wear this armor you can 't go as you are
so he tries to give the shepherd his armor and the shepherd says no he says i can 't wear this stuff the biblical verse is i cannot wear this for i have not proved it meaning i 've never worn armor before you 've got to be crazy
so he reaches down instead on the ground and picks up five stones and puts them in his shepherd 's bag and starts to walk down the mountainside to meet the giant
and the giant sees this figure approaching and calls out come to me so i can feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field he issues this kind of taunt towards this person coming to fight him
and the shepherd draws closer and closer and the giant sees that he 's carrying a staff that 's all he 's carrying instead of a weapon just this shepherd 's staff and he says he 's insulted am i a dog that you would come to me with sticks and the shepherd boy takes one
and the philistines see this and they turn and they just run
and of course the name of the giant is goliath and the name of the shepherd boy is david and the reason that story has obsessed me over the course of writing my book is that everything i thought i knew about that story turned out to be wrong
so david in that story is supposed to be the underdog right in fact that term david and goliath has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger now why do we call david an underdog
well we call him an underdog because he 's a kid a little kid and goliath is this big strong giant
we also call him an underdog because goliath is an experiencedwarrior and david is just a shepherd but most importantly we call him an underdog because all he has is it 's that goliath
in ancient warfare there are three kinds of warriors there 's cavalry men on horseback and with chariots
there 's heavy infantry which are foot soldiers armed foot soldiers with swords and shields and some kind of armor and there 's artillery and artillery are archers but more importantly slingers and a slinger is someone who has a leather pouch with two long cords attached to it
and they put a projectile either a rock or a lead ball inside the pouch and they whirl it around like this and they let one of the cords go and the effect is to send the projectile forward towards its target
that 's what david has and it 's important to understand that that sling is not a slingshot it 's not this right it 's not a child 's toy it 's in fact an incredibly devastating weapon when david
rolls it around like this he 's turning the sling around probably at six or seven revolutions per second
and that means that when the rock is released it 's going forward really fast probably thirty five meters per second that 's substantially faster than a baseball thrown by even the finest of baseball pitchers more than that
accuracy we know from historical records that slingers experienced slingers could hit and maim or even kill a target at distances of up to two hundred yards
from medieval tapestries we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight they were incrediblyaccurate when david lines up and he 's not two hundred yards away from goliath he 's quite close to goliath when he lines up and fires that thing at goliath
if you go back over the history of ancient warfare you will find time and time again that slingers were the decisivefactor against infantry in one kind of battle
the key phrase is come to me
come up to me because we 're going to fight hand to hand like this
saul has the same expectation david says i want to fight goliath and saul tries to give him his armor because saul is thinking oh when you say fight goliath you mean
fight him in hand to hand combatinfantry on infantry but david has absolutely no expectation he 's not going to fight him that way why would he he 's a shepherd he 's spent his entire career using a sling to defend his flock against lions and wolves that 's where his strength lies
so here he is this shepherdexperienced in the use of a devastating weapon up against this lumbering giant weighed down by a hundred pounds of armor and these incredibly heavy weapons that are useful only in short range combat
goliath is a sitting duck he doesn 't have a chance so why do we keep calling david an underdog and why do we keep referring to his victory as improbable
things that are in retrospect quite puzzling and don 't square with his image as this mighty warrior
so to begin with the bible says that goliath is led onto the valley floor by an attendant now that is weird right here is this mightywarrior challenging the israelites to one on one combat why is he being led by the hand by some
like this he 's not even carrying a sword why does goliath not react to that it 's as if he 's oblivious to what 's going on that day and then there 's that strange comment he makes to david am i a dog that you should come to me with
sticks sticks david only has one stick
well it turns out that there 's been a great deal of speculation within the medicalcommunity over the years about whether there is something fundamentally wrong with goliath an attempt to make sense of all of those apparent anomalies
far out of the norm there 's an explanation for it so the most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland
that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone and throughout history many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly
so the tallest person of all time was a guy named robert wadlow
who was still growing when he died at the age of twenty four and he was eight foot eleven
he had acromegaly do you remember the wrestler andre the giant famous he had acromegaly there 's even speculation that abraham lincoln had acromegaly anyone who 's unusually tall that 's the first explanation we come up with
and acromegaly has a very distinct set of side effects associated with it principally having to do with vision the pituitary tumor as it grows often starts to compress the visual nerves
in your brain with the result that people with acromegaly have either double vision or they are profoundly nearsighted
so when people have started to speculate about what might have been wrong with goliath they 've said wait a minute he looks and sounds an awful lot like someone who has acromegaly and that would also explain so much of what was strange about his behavior that day why does he move so slowly
to david that he doesn 't understand that david 's not going to fight him until the very last moment because he can 't see him when he says come to me that i might feed your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field
when david has only one
so the israelites up on the mountain ridge looking down on him thought he was this extraordinarily powerful foe what they didn 't understand was that the very thing that was the source of his apparent strength
was also the source of his greatest weakness and there is i think in that a very important lesson for all of us giants are not as strong and powerful as they seem and sometimes the shepherd boy has a sling in his pocket
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