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Bible Dictionaries
Elhanan
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible
or ELHANAN (‘God is gracious’). 1. The son of Jair according to 1 Chronicles 20:5 , of Jaare-oregim according to 2 Samuel 21:19; in the former text he is represented as slaying Lahmi the brother of Goliath, in the latter as slaying Goliath himself. A comparison of the Hebrew of these two texts is instructive, because they offer one of the clearest and simplest examples of how easy it is for corruptions to creep into the OT text. It is difficult, without using Hebrew letters, to show bow this is the case here; but the following points may be noticed. Oregim means ‘weavers,’ a word which occurs in the latter half of the verse in each case, and may easily have got displaced in the 2Sam. passage; in both the texts the word which should be the equivalent of Jair is wrongly written; the words ‘the Bethlehemite’ (2Sam.) and ‘Lahmi the brother of’ (1 Chr.) look almost identical when written in Hebrew. The original text, of which each of these two verses is a corruption, probably ran: ‘And Elhanan the son of Jair, the Bethlehemite, slew Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam.’ But if this is so, how are we to reconcile it with what we read of David’s killing Goliath? Judging from what we know of the natural tendency there is to ascribe heroic deeds to great national warriors, realizing the very corrupt state of the Hebrew text of the Books of Samuel, and remembering the conflicting accounts given of David’s first introduction to public life (see David, § 1 ), the probability is that Elhanan slew Goliath, and that this heroic deed was in later times ascribed to David.
2. In 2 Samuel 23:24 and 1 Chronicles 11:26 Elhanan the son of Dodo of Bethlehem is numbered among David’s ‘mighty men.’ Remembering that the word Jair above is wrongly written in each case, and that it thus shows signs of corruption, it is quite possible that this Elhanan and the one just referred to are one and the same.
W. O. E. Oesterley.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Elhanan'. Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdb/e/elhanan.html. 1909.
