Recently printed Bibles tell us Goliath stood about 6-foot-6
("four cubits and a span") -- an imposing Philistine, to be sure,
but one whose physical existence is easier to accept than the
9-foot-9 ("six cubits and a span") listed in many earlier translations
of 1 Samuel 17:4.
Goliath's revised height is one
of the products of the Dead Sea Scrolls translation recently completed
by Eugene Ulrich, O'Brien Professor of Theology, and colleagues.
The researchers spent nearly 25 years translating and analyzing
230 scrolls written between 250 B.C. and 70 A.D., a full millennium
before the Masoretic Hebrew manuscripts that form the basis of
all Christian Old Testaments and the Judaic Tanakh.
