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Bible Dictionaries
Goliath
Hawker's Poor Man's Concordance And Dictionary
or The gaint of Gall, one of the sons of Amak. His name signifies an heap, from Galah. The size of this man was enormous. "Six cubits and a span." So that supposing what is the common allowed measure of the cubit to have been, "one and twenty inches," and that a span was half a cubit, this man was eleven feet and four inches high. The armour he wore bore a correspondence to the greatness of his stature. His coat is said to have weighed five thousand shekels. A shekel was half an ounce. And if all the other parts of his armour carried a proportion to this, in his "helmet of brass, and the greaves of brass, and the target, and his spear's head, six hundered skels of iron," what an astonishing man must he have been in such an astonishing ponderous armour, in carrying that for exercise and slaughter which few strong men could lift from the ground! (See 1 Samuel 17:1-58 throughout.) But how soon David the stripling conquered him, when armed and lead on to victory by the Lord. But in reading the history of this battle we stop short of the chief glory of it, if we do not eye the Lord Jesus Christ, the almighty David of his Israel, conquering hell, death, and the grave, in all his Goliahs which come forth to defy the army of the living God. Oh! how blessed it is in all to behold Christ going forth "for the salvation of his people!"
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Hawker, Robert D.D. Entry for 'Goliath'. Hawker's Poor Man's Concordance and Dictionary. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/pmd/g/goliath.html. London. 1828.
