How tall was Goliath? The height given in many translations and commentaries, over nine feet tall, seems too tall to be credible. (FAQ 69 at Wartburg Project) Like many questions that come our way, this question, which at first seems to be very simple, turns out to be much more complicated than expected. Both the question and the answer seem to be very simple. The Hebrew text of 1 Samuel 17:4 says that Goliath was six cubits and a span tall. The standard default value for the cubit used by most translations is 18 inches. A span is half a cubit. The height of Goliath using this as the standard for the calculation would be 117 inches, or 9 feet, 9 inches. Since the EHV regularly uses the default translation of 18 inches for a cubit, that is what we have used as our starting point for this verse in the study Bible. 4 A challenger who represented the Philistines came out from the camp of the Philistines. He was named Goliath of Gath. He was nine feet, nine inches tall. c It seems that the solution is pretty straight forward, but a look at this revised footnote in the EHV study Bible is the first indication things are not so simple. c 17:4 Hebrew six cubits and a span. A Hebrew Dead Sea Scroll, some Greek manuscripts, and the historian Josephus have the variant four cubits and a span, that is, six feet, nine inches, for Goliath’s height. A typical Israelite teenager, like David, was probably in the 5-foot-2 range, and Saul, who was a head taller, would be more than 6 feet tall. But if David’s cubit was about 16 inches long rather than the default value of 18 inches, Goliath was considerably shorter than 9-foot-nine. This complicated question is discussed in detail in Wartburg Project FAQ 69. The problem is that the ancient cubit did not have a set standardized value. Eighteen inches is an estimate not a precise value. This is what Appendix 3 of the EHV study Bible says about the cubit: Ancient measurements were not based on a universal standard, but varied depending on the body size of the measurer or on the size of the container used to make the measurement, so all measurements in the EHV are approximate. Calculations are also rounded off. A cubit was the distance from the fingertip to the elbow. Scholars use a standard cubit of 18 inches, but the cubit of a typical 6-foot-tall man is 19½ inches. There also was a long cubit of about 21 inches. A span is the distance from the tip of the little finger to the tip of the thumb with the hand spread out. Scholars use a span of 9 inches, but the span of a typical 6-foot-tall man is 10 inches. David was probably much closer to 5' 3'' than to 6 foot, so his cubit would be considerably shorter than 18 inches, probably 16 inches or even less. We do not know the source of the measurement of Goliath. Did it come from Philistine pre-battle hype, or, as seems more likely, did David or one of the Israelite bystanders do a measurement of the fallen Goliath before David reduced his height by a foot or so? If Goliath was measured by an Israelite who had a cubit 16 inches long, Goliath’s height would translate into about 104 inches, 8' 8''. This falls into the range of the largest known modern giants. If the measurer had a cubit of 15 inches, the height would be about 97 inches, about 8' 1''. That brings us back to the variant reading of the Greek Old Testament: 4 cubits and a span = 6' 9'' if one uses 18-inch cubits. Many interpreters suggest that the reading of the Septuagint was an attempt by