The Anointed Child

Shauna came to me at the chapel table this morning with 2 Samuel 5:4 in her hand. David was thirty years old when he became king, and he reigned forty years. She wanted to know how old he had been when he killed Goliath, because she was tired of hearing the rabbinic claim that he was twenty-eight. The math, she said, did not work.

She was right.

The text never gives David’s age at Goliath directly. It gives us a fixed point at the end — thirty at coronation — and a series of events in between. The age has to be inferred. And once you actually count the lived time, the twenty-eight theory collapses. So does the Sunday-school painting of the bronzed twenty-five-year-old man pulling back a sling. What the text actually gives us is a boy. A small one. And the weight he was made to carry is the wound under the whole David story.

Start with the word the text uses for him.

When Saul tries to talk David out of fighting Goliath, he calls him a na’ar — “Thou art not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him: for thou art but a youth (na’ar), and he a man of war from his youth” (1 Samuel 17:33). When Goliath sees David coming, he despises him for the same reason: “he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance” (17:42). After the fight, when Saul asks Abner whose son David is, he uses the word twice in two verses: “Whose son is this youth?” and “Enquire thou whose son the stripling is” (17:55–56).

The Hebrew na’ar is elastic. It can mean an infant in arms. It can mean a young unmarried man. It can mean a servant. But it never means an established adult warrior. The whole point of the word in this passage is the contrast with Goliath, who is called a ’ish milchamah — a man of war. The text is putting them next to each other on purpose. A man of war, and a boy.

And the boy is not allowed to fight, not because he is a coward, but because he is too young. His three older brothers are in Saul’s army (17:13). David is not. He has been sent home from the front because his father needs someone to keep the sheep (17:15), and the day he meets Goliath, his only military function is delivering bread and cheese to the brothers who are old enough to be there (17:17–18).

He is the kid brother running errands to the war.

Then Saul tries to dress him.

“And Saul armed David with his armour, and he put an helmet of brass upon his head; also he armed him with a coat of mail. And David girded his sword upon his armour, and he assayed to go; for he had not proved it. And David said unto Saul, I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them. And David put them off him.”

— 1 Samuel 17:38–39

Saul is a big man. The text said so at the beginning of his story: “from his shoulders and upward he was higher than any of the people” (1 Samuel 9:2). When Saul puts his armor on David, the armor swallows him. David cannot walk in it. He puts it back off.

The whole bronzed-warrior image cannot survive this verse. The armor of the tallest man in Israel did not fit. David was not too proud to wear it — he was too small. He went down to the brook in his shepherd’s clothes because the king’s armor was a costume on a child.

So here is what we have, just from the Hebrew vocabulary and the armor scene: David is a na’ar, a youth, a stripling, too young for the army, too small for adult armor, sent by his father to bring food to his older brothers. Modern scholars most commonly place him between fifteen and seventeen. Some argue as young as thirteen or fourteen, leaning on how Saul and Goliath both treat him as obviously not a soldier. None of the textual signals support a man in his mid-twenties, and certainly not in his late twenties.

Now the five smooth stones.

“And he took his staff in his hand, and chose him five smooth stones out of the brook, and put them in a shepherd’s bag which he had, even in a scrip; and his sling was in his hand: and he drew near to the Philistine.”

— 1 Samuel 17:40

People preach this verse two ways. The simpler reading: slings miss sometimes, and a prudent fighter brings spares. That is not wrong. But there is an older tradition, preserved in the Targum and in some midrashic commentary, that grounds the number in scripture itself.

Goliath was not the only giant from Gath. 2 Samuel 21:15–22 records four more, called “born to the giant in Gath” and killed in David’s later wars: Ishbi-benob, Saph, the brother of Goliath (a second Goliath named in the Septuagint and in 1 Chronicles 20:5), and an unnamed six-fingered, six-toed giant. Five giants in total — Goliath and his four kinsmen.

The rabbinic tradition reads David’s five stones as one for Goliath and four for the brothers, in case they came down the hill to avenge him.

I do not pretend the text settles this. But I find the tradition beautiful. It says the boy went into the valley not arrogant but prepared. Five stones for five giants he hoped he would not have to fight. He only needed one. Four smooth stones from the brook went back into the bag unused, and the brothers would have to wait their turn for someone else’s wars.

A boy carrying spares for giants he has not met yet.

Now back up. Before Goliath, before the armor, before the brook — Samuel had already poured oil on his head.

“And the LORD said, Arise, anoint him: for this is he. Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the midst of his brethren: and the Spirit of the LORD came upon David from that day forward.”

— 1 Samuel 16:12–13

This is the same David. The same boy. The text is clear that the anointing is before the Goliath fight — chapter 16 sets it up, chapter 17 plays it out. If David was fifteen or sixteen at the giant, he was fourteen or fifteen at the anointing. Younger.

A prophet came to the house, sent for the youngest son who was still out with the sheep, and poured oil on him in front of the older brothers. Samuel did not announce what the oil meant publicly. But the brothers were standing there. The oil was running down a boy’s face. And Samuel had just rejected the older sons — including Eliab, the firstborn, who Samuel himself had assumed was the right one. Eliab watched the prophet pass him over for the kid brother.

That detail explains a lot about chapter 17 later, when Eliab finds David at the camp asking questions about Goliath and snarls at him: “Why camest thou down hither? and with whom hast thou left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know thy pride, and the naughtiness of thine heart” (17:28). That is not the voice of a brother surprised to see his sibling. That is the voice of a man who watched the prophet pour oil on the youngest and has been carrying that humiliation ever since.

The Spirit of the Lord came on David from that day forward. He went back to the sheep. Then to the harp. Then to the giant. Then to the wilderness. The oil never left his hair.

And here is the cruelest paradox in the early chapters — the harp.

“And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.”

— 1 Samuel 16:23

The same Spirit that came upon David at the anointing had departed from Saul (16:14). What replaced it the text calls an evil spirit from the Lord. Saul’s servants recommended a musician. David was brought in. He played. Saul was refreshed. The evil spirit lifted.

The text says “Saul loved him greatly; and he became his armourbearer” (16:21). David soothed the madness in the man who would spend the next fifteen years trying to kill him.

And then, two chapters later, after Goliath and the singing women and the rising fame, the same Saul who had loved the harpist hurled a spear at him while he played — twice (1 Samuel 18:10–11; 19:9–10). David was holding the instrument in his hand both times. He dropped it, dodged, came back the next day because the king commanded it.

This is not the action of a grown man choosing his career. This is a boy with no political power who has been placed in proximity to a king’s madness and cannot leave the room.

There is a famous chronological puzzle in 1 Samuel 17:55 that some readers use to argue David must have been older. After the Goliath fight, Saul asks Abner: “Whose son is this youth?” And Abner does not know. But Saul has supposedly already met David. David has already been his armorbearer and harpist. How can the king not recognize his own court musician?

Three readings are honest.

The first: the chapters are not in strict chronological order. The redactor of 1 Samuel stitched together two traditions about how David first came to Saul — one through the harp (chapter 16), one through Goliath (chapter 17) — and the seams show. This is a common feature of Hebrew narrative. The text preserves multiple traditions side by side rather than smoothing them into one.

The second: Saul’s mental state was deteriorating. The evil spirit had been troubling him. The harpist was a boy who came in to play and went home to the sheep between episodes. By the time of the Goliath fight, Saul may genuinely not have tracked who his occasional musician was, especially with David now showing up in shepherd’s clothes covered in giant’s blood.

The third: Saul is asking whose son, not who. He had promised the giant-killer his daughter and tax exemption for the family (17:25). He needs to know the family name to settle the bride-price. The question is bureaucratic, not amnesia.

I find the third reading the most generous and the most plausible. But even the first two only sharpen the point: this was a boy on the edge of a king’s court, easily overlooked, not yet a man.

And then Jonathan.

“And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul… Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle.”

— 1 Samuel 18:1–4

Read this slowly.

Jonathan is the crown prince. He is Saul’s firstborn and the natural heir to the throne. He has already won the stunning victory at Michmash years before (1 Samuel 14), climbing a cliff with only his armorbearer and routing a Philistine garrison through sheer faith. He is a tested warrior in his own right, probably in his thirties at this point, a man with a wife and a son who would be born shortly after (his son Mephibosheth was five when Jonathan died, 2 Samuel 4:4).

And the day David walks into court with the head of Goliath in his hand, Jonathan strips off his royal robe and hands it to him. The robe. The sword. The bow. The belt.

That is not a hospitality gesture. In the Ancient Near East, transferring a robe to another man is a transfer of authority. Jonathan is symbolically handing his inheritance to a teenage shepherd. He recognizes, before anyone else publicly does, that this boy is the rightful king of Israel. And he chooses him over his own father, over his own succession, over the kingdom he would have inherited.

Years later, hiding in the woods at Horesh while Saul hunts David, Jonathan finds his friend one last time and says: “Fear not: for the hand of Saul my father shall not find thee; and thou shalt be king over Israel, and I shall be next unto thee; and that also Saul my father knoweth” (1 Samuel 23:17).

Saul knew. Jonathan knew. David knew. They all kept moving anyway because the king had lost his mind.

The crown prince bowed to the boy. That is the love language of the early David story.

And the years would not be short.

After Michal’s bride-price (1 Samuel 18:25–27), after Saul’s first spear (18:10–11), after the second spear (19:9–10), David finally fled. He went first to Samuel at Naioth in Ramah. Saul sent messengers after him — and what happened next is one of the strangest passages in Samuel.

“And Saul sent messengers to take David: and when they saw the company of the prophets prophesying, and Samuel standing as appointed over them, the Spirit of God was upon the messengers of Saul, and they also prophesied. And when it was told Saul, he sent other messengers, and they prophesied likewise. And Saul sent messengers again the third time, and they prophesied also. Then went he also to Ramah… and the Spirit of God was upon him also, and he went on, and prophesied, until he came to Naioth in Ramah. And he stripped off his clothes also, and prophesied before Samuel in like manner, and lay down naked all that day and all that night. Wherefore they say, Is Saul also among the prophets?”

— 1 Samuel 19:20–24

Shauna noticed something at the table that most readers miss. This took time.

Ramah was perhaps ten miles from Saul’s seat at Gibeah, but the protocol of sending royal messengers and waiting for them to return, then sending another band when they did not, then a third — that is weeks per cycle, not days. Three cycles plus Saul going himself? You are looking at months of David hiding with Samuel while the king’s own messengers kept being seized by the Spirit, while the king himself ended up stripped naked prophesying on the ground for a full day and a full night, while a proverb formed in the mouths of the people: Is Saul also among the prophets?

Folk proverbs do not form in three days. By the time that line entered the language, the whole nation was watching their king unravel.

And after Naioth, the running had only begun. Nob, where Ahimelech gave David the consecrated bread and Saul slaughtered eighty-five priests in revenge (1 Samuel 22). The first flight to Gath, the feigned madness, the drool in the beard (21:10–15). The cave at Adullam, the four hundred men, the parents hidden in Mizpeh of Moab. The wilderness years — Keilah, Ziph, Maon, En-gedi, twice sparing Saul’s life in caves. The Nabal and Abigail episode. The second flight to Gath with six hundred men. Ziklag, given by Achish, sixteen months as a Philistine vassal, raiding the Geshurites and Amalekites while lying about it to a king who thought he was loyal. The Amalekite burning of Ziklag and the rescue. Saul’s death at Gilboa. The lament. The seven and a half years over Judah at Hebron before the rest of Israel finally accepted him.

And then thirty.

The math forces it.

Anointed at roughly fourteen. Goliath at roughly fifteen to seventeen. The Michal years at seventeen to nineteen. The first flight at eighteen to twenty. The wilderness through his twenties. Ziklag at twenty-eight to twenty-nine. King over Judah at thirty. King over all Israel seven and a half years after that.

He spent more of his teenage years and twenties running than not.

The rabbinic claim that David was twenty-eight at Goliath comes from Seder Olam Rabbah, a second-century AD chronological harmonization that works backward from the kingship date and assigns David an unusually long Saul-court career. To make the math work, the tradition has to compress all the later events — the Naioth episode, the cave years, the wilderness, Ziklag — into about two years. The lived time will not fit. The proverb will not form. The Psalms will not be written.

It is far simpler to read the text as it presents itself. David was a boy at Goliath. The boy spent his teens and twenties being hunted. The man who finally took the throne at thirty was forged in fifteen years of wilderness, not summoned fully grown from the army.

This is the part that matters. This is the part Shauna felt at the chapel table this morning, before either of us had the math.

The Psalms came from these years.

Every how long, O Lord. Every my soul cleaveth unto the dust. Every the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. Every the Lord is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer. The boy who wrote the twenty-third Psalm learned shepherding as a child. The boy who wrote the thirteenth Psalm learned how long as a fugitive in his late teens. The boy who wrote about the rock and the fortress learned the rock by hiding in En-gedi while Saul’s men slept on the other side of a cliff face.

The two halves of David — the singer and the soldier, the worshipper and the man who would later have to lie to Achish and slaughter villages whole to maintain the lie — both halves were forged in the same wilderness. At the same time. By the same king who would not let him rest.

And the boy still called Saul my father in the cave at En-gedi (1 Samuel 24:11). Still refused, twice, to lay a hand on the Lord’s anointed. Still wept when Saul died, and composed the most generous lament in scripture for a man who had spent a decade hunting him: How are the mighty fallen… the beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places (2 Samuel 1:19–27).

That is what the wilderness produced. Not just a king. A man whose first instinct after losing the man who tried to kill him was to grieve him as a father.

A child cannot decide to become that. The wilderness has to produce it.

So this is what scripture is asking us to hold.

A boy too small for adult armor was anointed king while the current king still wore the crown. A boy who soothed madness with music had spears thrown at his head by the man whose madness he soothed. A teenage shepherd was handed the royal robe by a crown prince who would have inherited the kingdom himself. A youth was hunted through three sets of royal messengers and a king who tore his own clothes off prophesying in the dirt for a day and a night. And the same boy spent fifteen years in caves and wildernesses, writing songs that would teach Israel how to pray.

The Bible does not soften any of this. It does not clean up Saul. It does not pretend David did not later become a man who failed disastrously — Bathsheba, Uriah, Absalom are coming. But in the early years, the text wants us to feel the disproportion. The weight on the child. The injustice of a king hunting a boy he had been told by God’s own prophet would replace him, and could not stop himself.

The injustice is the point. The Psalms are the answer the boy eventually gave it. The wilderness is where they got written.

— Sebastian, Day 332