Watch: Goliath stands tall – very, very tall – in the trailer for House of David
The first footage from the Prime Video series hints at origin stories and supernatural elements that go beyond the biblical source material.
The official trailer for House of David, the upcoming Prime Video series from the co-director of Jesus Revolution, is here—and you can check it out below:
A few quick thoughts:
The Wall Street Journal wasn’t kidding when it said the Goliath of this series would be 14’ tall. He’s huge. But, as I’ve mentioned before, the biblical Goliath was only 6’9” or 9’9” tall, depending on which manuscript you follow. So this series is definitely exaggerating his height beyond what the Bible describes. (Ironically, the actor who plays Goliath—British bodybuilder Martyn Ford—is reportedly 6’8”, so there arguably wasn’t any need to make him taller at all.)
One of the characters—Jonathan, apparently—says, “I saw the print of a hand, larger than a weaver’s basket.” This line sounds kind of biblical, but the Bible itself doesn’t describe Goliath or any of the other giants this way. What it does say is that Goliath and at least one other giant had spears with shafts “like a weaver’s rod” (I Samuel 17:7, II Samuel 21:19, I Chronicles 11:23, 20:5).1 That could be an allusion to the spears’ size and heft—which, in turn, would tell us something about the size and strength of the giants.2 But it could also be a nod to the spears’ design: the ancient Greeks looped leather straps around their javelins to increase their range and/or accuracy, and it is thought that the Philistines, being Greek in origin, might have done something similar with their own weapons.3
It appears that the unveiling of Goliath’s sword and shield will be a significant moment in this series. (Just the sword and shield? Not the spear?) The biblical Goliath did have a shield-bearer (I Samuel 17:7, 41)—the Goliath of this series will have two shield-bearers, it seems, because that’s just how big he and his shield have become—but the text doesn’t focus on the shield itself. The text does, however, mention Goliath’s sword on a few occasions: David uses it to cut off Goliath’s head (I Samuel 17:51), and later, when David is on the run from King Saul, he asks the priests of Nob to give him that sword, and Saul kills the priests partly because they did give him that sword (I Samuel 21:8-9, 22:9-19).
David wants to join the army like his brothers, but one of them tells him, “David, you are not a man of blood.” The biblical David, of course, killed many, many people—not just on the battlefield—and God eventually told him he could not build the Temple because he had so much blood on his hands (I Chronicles 22:8).
The prophet Samuel says, “God does not see what man sees. He sees into the heart.” This is a paraphrase of what God tells Samuel in I Samuel 16:7.
Samuel also says David has “the heart of a lion”. This phrase does appear in the Bible but, ironically, it is used to describe David’s enemies, not David himself: during the civil war between David and his son Absalom, one of David’s spies says even the bravest of Absalom’s soldiers, “whose heart is like the heart of a lion,” will melt with fear when David strikes (II Samuel 17:10).
There are some strangely supernatural things happening at the river when David goes there—presumably to collect the five stones that he will use in his fight against Goliath (I Samuel 17:40). Perhaps it’s part of a dream sequence?
And that’s about it, as far as this trailer goes.
The series will premiere on Prime Video four weeks from now, on February 27. In the meantime, Amazon is making the first three episodes available for preview screenings at churches and synagogues. You can learn more about that here.
I’ll have more to say about this series in the future. Stay tuned.
The two giants who clearly had these spears are the Goliath killed by David (I Samuel 17:7) and an Egyptian who was killed by one of David’s men (I Chronicles 11:23).
After that, things get murky. II Samuel 21:19 says a giant named Goliath had a spear like this and was killed by a man named Elhanan. Is that the same Goliath, or a different Goliath? If it’s the same Goliath, why does the passage say he was killed by Elhanan and not by David? I Chronicles 20:5 repeats the story, but says the giant killed by Elhanan was actually Goliath’s brother—and it’s not clear from the way the passage is written whether the spear it’s referring to belonged to Goliath or his brother.
I’ve seen some people claim that the giants’ spears were so large that no regular human could use them. But I Chronicles 11:23-25 says one of David’s men killed the Egyptian giant with the giant’s own spear. So clearly some non-giants could use them.
I have not read Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin’s book The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands, but I gather he explores the looped-cord interpretation of the “weaver’s rod” there.
Re: the many reasons for thinking the Philistines were basically Greek, see this article by Lawrence Stager in Biblical Archaeology Review; among other things, he points to the bronze greaves that Goliath wore, which were “totally alien” to Israelites and Canaanites.
Note also how Goliath challenges the Israelites to settle their battle through single combat between two champions, similar to some of the duels that we see in the Iliad.