The Ground Seized Goliath's Feet So David Could Not Miss

For forty mornings and forty evenings the giant came down into the valley of Elah and planted his feet, and the men of Israel turned their faces away. Goliath did not only want a corpse. He wanted the words. He had counted the days on purpose, and now he stood between the armies and shouted the count out loud.

The Taunt He Counted on His Fingers

"Forty days," he bellowed, and his voice carried up the slope to where Israel was camped. "You say a child takes shape in the womb in forty days. Behold, I have waited for you forty. Choose yourselves a man and let him come down to me."

The insult was built like a riddle, and the sages who later turned it over heard the cruelty folded inside it. He was telling them that their God had spent forty days forming each of them in the dark, and that all that careful work could be undone in an afternoon by one Philistine with a spear. He was offering them a wager on the worth of a Jewish life, and he was laughing while he set the terms.

Then he sharpened it. "Give me a man," he roared, "and let us fight together." But the word he used was the word from the Song at the Sea, the word that calls the LORD a man of war. Goliath was not asking for a soldier. He was calling out the God of Israel by name and demanding that He come down into the dust of Elah and wrestle. Every dawn and every dusk for six weeks the same blasphemy crossed the valley, and every dawn and every dusk no one answered it.

The Shepherd Who Heard the Hidden Meaning

Then a boy walked out of the camp who still carried the smell of the flock. David had heard the taunt and heard what was underneath it, the contempt for the forty days of forming, the summons flung at heaven. He did not argue theology. He prayed it. "Grant not, O LORD, the desires of the wicked," he said. "Further not his evil device." Do not let his scheme go forth. Do not let the boast become a fact.

Goliath looked at the shepherd coming toward him with a staff and a pouch and something snapped in his confidence. The words he had rehearsed for forty days came out wrong. "Come to me," he meant to scream, the way a man dares an enemy to charge. But his tongue betrayed him and he said instead, "Come at me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the sky and to the beasts of the field." It was a small slip and a fatal one. A man who could not even keep his own threat straight had already begun to lose.

The Earth Took Hold of His Feet

David saw the giant's speech fall apart and pressed in. "This one of mine is in the city," he answered, naming the beast he would feed, "who eats flesh, the way you say, to the wild beasts of the field." The taunt was no longer Goliath's. It had been turned around in his mouth.

And while the two of them traded words across the shrinking ground, the ground itself moved. The earth reached up and seized hold of the giant's feet. The colossus who had stridden into the valley twice a day for forty days now stood rooted where he was, the soil clamped around his ankles like a fist. He could not step back. He could not dodge. He could not turn and run for the Philistine line. The whole bulk of him, the bronze and the iron and the towering frame, was pinned in place by the field he had trampled, and he did not yet know it.

The Two Hundred and Forty-Eight Chains

Heaven was binding more than his feet. Upon each of the two hundred and forty-eight limbs in Goliath's body the Holy One laid a chain, all of them at once, two hundred and forty-eight unseen fetters locking joint and sinew so the giant could not so much as raise an arm to ward off what came. This was the answer to David's prayer made flesh. He had asked that the wicked man's scheme not go forth, that the proud bowings be brought low, and now every part of the proud body had been set in irons.

The colossus who had demanded a duel could not move a finger to fight one. David called across the last of the distance. "This day the LORD will deliver you up." Some said the curse arrived even before the stone, that the giant's skin broke out white with leprosy as he stood there bound, already a corpse waiting to be shut outside the camp. Then the stone left the sling, and there was nothing in all the chained immensity of him that could lean an inch out of its path.

What the Whole Earth Learned

He fell the way a tower falls, all at once and straight down, because there was no longer any joint in him free to buckle or bend. David finished his own sentence as the giant dropped. "I will give the carcass of the camp of the Philistines this day to the birds of the sky and to the beasts of the earth." Not the cattle. The wild beasts. The boaster had wanted a man to maul a man; he became carrion for animals instead.

And the last clause of David's vow stood over the valley like a verdict. "All the earth shall know that there is a God for Israel." The same earth that had gripped the giant's feet now held his weight, and the God whom Goliath had dared to call down into the dust had answered, not by coming down to wrestle, but by making the dust itself do His work.