Malcolm Gladwell: The unheard story of David and Goliath

Did History get the narrative wrong?

 

Philistines: The first victims of the Jewish media cabal.

 

I'd be shocked to find out a Bible story isn't true.

 

Not available for comment.

 

That's the first time I've ever actually seen what Malcolm Gladwell looks like. How many birds live in that nest of hair on his head?

 

As long as no one tells me Earth isn't really 6,000 years old.

 

There's no point in his talk that he contradicts the story that's written in the Bible, though. He reinforces it and brings attention to another layer that was there all along.

Yes, David was a skinny kid armed with a sling and Goliath was a big-ass warrior.

But David, and he made this argument to Saul, was a pro. He'd guarded sheep, perfecting his aim, and he'd brought down quicker things than the bis-ass warrior. Many things.

If you read the text, David had no doubt he'd make the shot. Gladwell is right in that it's not an underdog story. In the Bible, it doesn't say it's an underdog story, though. That's what someone else told you. If you believed it, well, you can always go back and study it.

When you read or hear the story as a kid, you take it at face value, but if you really study it, the translations, the culture and such, you discover it's deeper than you've been told.

A lot of Bible stories are like that. And there are also many stories that have been embellished as time's passed. But if you go back to the text itself, its not what you might have been told or seen depicted popularly. (Such as wise men visiting the Christ child in a stable -- that is WAY off.)

 

Gladwell makes the case that Goliath was an infantryman, immobile and bogged down in heavy armor with weapons designed for hand-to-hand combat. David was smarter, mobile, unencumbered and had, in essence, artillery. Not only was David an unlikely underdog, he should have been the favorite.

Gladwell also tries to make the case that Goliath suffered from diseases that left him close to blind and needed a guide to get to the field of battle. He couldn't even get a fixed position on where David was when he took the shot heard round the world.

Like the Genesis story, the flood, the Virgin birth and a Messiah, there are probably dozens of stories like David and Goliath in dozens of ancient cultures. Part of the Genius of the Jewish faith is eventually the Jewish stories were not only reduced to writings from oral retellings, but organized into a unified bible. The perseverance of the Jewish faith and people to maintain an early bronze age religion into the modern times is the real miracle of the bible.

 

A lot of criticism and debunking lately of Gladwell theories and, particularly, his approach to "science." He's a storyteller whose studies get way more weight in the marketplace than they ought to.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/10/malcolm_gladwell_critique_david_and_goliath_misrepresents_the_science.html

http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/52014/index1.html

 

Right. Which contradicts nothing written in the Bible.

It might go against what people have assumed about the story, but it doesn't contradict what's written.

 

Goliath had a very poor dWAR.

 

Whatever will the Hickory Huskers use for a pregame speech now?