The Armour, the City, and a Sherd from Tell es-Safi

The description of the champion's equipment is unusually detailed for the Hebrew Bible: a bronze helmet, a coat of scale armour, bronze greaves, a bronze javelin between his shoulders, a spear with a shaft like a weaver's beam and an iron head, and a shield bearer walking ahead of him. Greaves in particular are not Israelite kit, and the assemblage as described resembles the heavy infantry equipment of the Aegean world more than that of the Judean hills, which fits what is otherwise known about Philistine material culture and its Aegean connections.

The combat itself follows a recognised convention in which two armies avoid a general engagement by putting forward single champions and abiding by the result. The narrative makes David break the convention rather than win within it: he refuses the armour Saul offers, comes with a staff and a sling, and kills at range before contact.

Goliath is called a Gittite, a man of Gath, which is identified with the large mound of Tell es-Safi in the Judean foothills and has been excavated for decades. In 2005 a sherd was published from that site bearing two personal names of a non Semitic type whose form is close to the name Goliath. It does not identify any individual and nobody involved claimed that it did. What it establishes is narrower and still useful: names of that shape were in use at Gath in roughly the right period, so the name in the story belongs to the place the story assigns it to.