David Read the Lion and Bear as Signs Before Facing Goliath
A lion took a lamb and David killed it with his hands. Then a bear did the same. He decided twice was not luck and walked down into the valley.
Table of Contents
Click for full size
The Lion Came First
The lion came out of the scrub at the edge of the flock and had a lamb by the neck before the dogs finished barking. David was alone on that hillside with a staff and a sling and no help within shouting distance. He went in. He got a hand into the mane, pulled the head back, and stayed with it while it turned on him, and when it stopped moving he was sitting in the dirt with his sleeve open and the lamb bleating somewhere behind his shoulder.
He told nobody. Shepherds lose sheep. Shepherds do not usually walk away from the thing that took them.
Later a bear came down for the same flock. The same boy went in, and the same boy walked home.
He Counted Twice and Stopped Calling It Luck
Once is a story to tell at a well. Twice is arithmetic.
David sat a long time with the second carcass. He never said heaven had rescued him from it. He said the harder thing, the one he kept repeating afterward to anyone who would listen. "Both the lion and the bear your servant has slain." Slain. His hands, his weight, his knee against the animal's ribs. Something had been put into his arms that did not belong to a boy who carried lambs for a living, and it had been put there twice, out on a hill where nobody was watching and nothing was at stake but a few sheep.
Two dead animals, two signs, and he read them the way another man reads weather.
Nobody practices for nothing.
"Why should I be afraid of the Philistine," he said. "I have killed wild beasts with these hands. Something is going to happen in Israel, and Israel is going to be saved through me."
The Valley That Would Not Move
By the time he reached the valley with bread for his brothers, the two armies had been facing each other across the floor of it for forty days and neither had come down. Every morning the Philistine walked out and shouted. Every morning the line of Israel held still and let him shout. Men who had killed in real battles studied the ground at their feet. His brothers told him to go back to the sheep.
David watched the giant the way a shepherd watches movement in the scrub, and kept walking.
Three Weapons and One Name
Goliath came down carrying a sword, a spear, and a javelin. One blade for close work, one for the reach, one to throw. Three answers to three distances, bronze on his chest, bronze on his shins, a shield bearer walking ahead of him. He looked at the boy coming toward him with a stick and asked whether he was a dog.
David did not argue about the stick.
"You come to me with a sword, a spear, and a javelin," he said. "But I come to you with the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel."
He had worked that sentence out on a hillside with a dead bear in front of him. Now he said it louder, in front of two armies, to a man who had brought an arsenal to a fight that had already been decided somewhere nobody could see.
What Fell and What Stood
Israel kept the shape of that line long after the giant was in the ground, and sang it back at itself whenever the ground shook. Some come with chariots and some with horses. We call on the name of the Lord our God. They knelt and they fell, and we rose and stood up straight.
The three weapons were still on Goliath when he went down. He never got to use any of them. That is the piece that stayed: a full arsenal lying in the dust beside a man who had counted on it, and a shepherd walking back up the slope who had counted on two dead animals nobody had seen him kill.
← All myths
