I watched the film “David” with my son a few days ago and was pretty impressed. Being the history nerd that I am, I was inspired to re-read the story from the book of Samuel for the first time in 20 years and see just how accurate the film was. I was a bit surprised to see that overall, it was really faithful to the Biblical account. I loved seeing the depictions of the armor, weapons, and the geography of the region, though I can tell they took a few liberties for the sake of story-telling drama.

Anyway, I decided I wanted to write my own account of David and Goliath, which was a favorite story of mine anyway when I as a kid. I sat down and did some research of my own. Amazingly, place names in Israel are pretty similar, even identical in some cases, to what they were called in the Bible, in spite of the incredible gap in time. That means that unlike the issue of pinpointing Arthur’s battles in Britain for example, locating the Israelite and Philistine camp sites (roughly) within the Valley of Elah, located near Bethlehem, was pretty easy. There’s not a lot of information on warfare and tactics of the Philistines and Israelites of 1000 B.C., but there’s enough to make a credible story, at least from my perspective. As always, I’m sure there are scholars out there who could pick my story apart with inaccuracies, but I don’t hold myself to the standard of being perfect. There comes a point where it’s just not worth spending 10 hours of research just to determine the exact style of helmet Goliath might have worn for example. Especially if I can just mention that he’s wearing one, and not go into detail as to exactly how it looks.

So the upshot is, I took a single chapter from the book of Samuel and turned it into a 5,000 word short story that I think does justice to both history, and to the Biblical record itself.