A head fell in Elah, and a sermon died.

That is how the day should be remembered. Not first for armor or for height, but for a voice that ruled a valley until its mouth lay silent in the dust. The place was a door—Elah—one of the east–west corridors that lift from the Philistine plain toward the high country of Judah, toward Bethlehem, and, beyond it, Jerusalem. Two ridges stand there like jaws. Between them runs a stony bed where a brook cuts the ground when the rains come. Fort-towns keep watch on this hinge: Socoh and Azekah—the same Azekah that once looked on when Joshua chased five Amorite kings and hailstones fell from the sky (Joshua 10:10–11). Centuries later, when Babylon pressed Judah, only Lachish and Azekah were left holding the line (Jeremiah 34:7). Elah is not a random field. It is a threshold, old as conquest, stubborn as covenant.

The west ridge fills with Philistines. They are coastal people, bound by five cities—Gaza, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, Gath—and five lords. They trust iron. In Saul’s day, there was no smith found in Israel; plowshares and axes went down to Philistine forges for sharpening (1 Samuel 13:19–22). When a people owns the fires, they walk as if they own tomorrow. They favor champions: one man who stands between the lines and decides a war with spectacle.

From Gath came their spectacle. Goliath. Gath sits in the low hills where old rumors of the Anakim once clung. In Joshua’s time, Israel drove the giants from the hill country, from Hebron, Debir, and the heights, until none remained there; only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did remnants linger (Joshua 11:21–22). However the bloodlines ran, Goliath moved like a man raised to believe that size is destiny. Bronze scaled his chest. Greaves struck his shins. The shaft of his spear was like a weaver’s beam; the iron head weighed more than most men could easily lift. He was not only a fighter. He was a voice.

He stepped down the slope and preached.

“I defy the armies of Israel this day.” He named the field with his tongue and tried to rename the people across from him: “ye servants to Saul.” Not servants of the living God—servants of a man. Twice a day for forty days he gave this liturgy—morning and evening—until the valley itself seemed to hold the rhythm. Valleys carry sound; Elah is shaped for it. The brook-bed took his words and threw them up both hillsides like ringing metal.

Israel heard and “were dismayed, and greatly afraid” (1 Samuel 17:11). Then Israel saw, and “they fled from him, and were sore afraid” (1 Samuel 17:24). Hearing framed seeing. Sight simply obeyed the sermon enthroned at the ear.

On the east ridge sat Saul—the king who had once listened well. Partial obedience had made his hearing heavy. He measured like a soldier—height, weight, reach—and could not find a man long enough to bridge the space “between.” He offered reward, a daughter, freedom from taxes. He waited. Waiting hardened into ritual.

Into that ritual walked a boy with bread.

Jesse sent David from Bethlehem with roasted grain and ten loaves for his brothers—Eliab, Abinadab, Shammah—and cheeses for their captain (1 Samuel 17:17–18). David left the sheep with a keeper; shepherds who have pried open jaws do not gamble with lambs. His school had been the hillside: stars keeping their appointments, wind moving a flock like water, a sling balanced in quiet hands, sudden roars in the grass answered by a learned grip and a whisper that knew God was near.

He arrived as the giant’s voice rolled the valley again. David did not begin by looking; he began by listening. The words did not fit the story he lived in. “What shall be done to the man that killeth this Philistine, and taketh away the reproach from Israel?” he asked; and then he named the center: “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” (1 Samuel 17:26). He weighed a warrior against covenant, not against height.

Eliab burned. Old houses keep younger brothers small with quick sentences. “Why camest thou down hither?… I know thy pride” (1 Samuel 17:28). David turned away—he had practice turning from voices that did not carry God—and answered with the line that opens the field like a gate: “What have I now done? Is there not a cause?” (1 Samuel 17:29). Not a wager. Not a trophy. A cause—God’s Name dragged into scorn; a people forgetting who they are.

Word reached Saul. They brought David into the king’s tent. Saul saw a shepherd. David spoke, and the tent filled with a history the king had not counted: “Thy servant kept his father’s sheep, and there came a lion, and a bear, and took a lamb out of the flock: and I went out after him, and smote him, and delivered it out of his mouth: and when he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him, and slew him. Thy servant slew both the lion and the bear: and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them” (1 Samuel 17:34–36). This was not bravado; it was memory shaped by nearness: “The LORD that delivered me out of the paw of the lion, and out of the paw of the bear, he will deliver me out of the hand of this Philistine” (1 Samuel 17:37).

Saul reached for what steadies frightened leaders—armor and sword. He clothed the boy with his own. David walked a few steps beneath it, then shook his head. “I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them” (1 Samuel 17:39). It was not scorn; it was loyalty to the lessons that had made his hands sure. He handed the armor back, walked down into the bed of stones, and “chose him five smooth stones out of the brook… and his sling was in his hand” (1 Samuel 17:40). He also carried his staff—the sign that he had learned to lead life, not only to meet threat.

The giant saw him and laughed without smiling. “Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves?” He cursed David by his gods—by the iron and the fish-bodied idol who had once fallen on his face before the ark (1 Samuel 5). He promised to feed David’s flesh to the birds and the beasts (1 Samuel 17:43–44). He was a practiced preacher; cadence and scorn were tools of his trade.

David did not borrow that tongue. He told the truth in simple lines: “Thou comest to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come to thee in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom thou hast defied” (1 Samuel 17:45). He put the field back into its true court: “The battle is the LORD’S, and he will give you into our hands” (1 Samuel 17:47). Then he ran. Faith that has already decided does not inch; it closes distance.

The sling sang. One stone left the circle and flew straight. Scripture says it “smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth” (1 Samuel 17:49). The sermon that had ruled the valley fell forward—face to dirt—as if the ground itself refused his altar call.

David did not stop at a fall. He ran again, stood upon the Philistine, “and took his sword, and drew it out of the sheath thereof, and slew him, and cut off his head therewith” (1 Samuel 17:51). The mouth that had fed forty mornings came up in his hand. A headless preacher. The sermon ended where it started.

Philistia broke. “The Philistines saw their champion was dead, they fled” (1 Samuel 17:51). They ran along the way to Shaaraim (Two Gates), to the gates of Ekron, toward Gath—the very roads by which they had marched (1 Samuel 17:52). Israel found its legs and its shout. They pursued, they struck, and afterward they “spoiled their tents” (1 Samuel 17:53). David “took the head of the Philistine, and brought it to Jerusalem; but he put his armour in his tent” (1 Samuel 17:54)—a prophetic deposit in a city not yet fully his people’s, as if to say, this is where God’s victories belong.

Only then did Saul ask the question a fearful heart asks late: “Whose son is this youth?” The answer was simple: “The son of thy servant Jesse the Bethlehemite” (1 Samuel 17:58).

Elah did not close that day. The valley kept its witness. When David later fled, hungry and hunted, the priest at Nob said, “The sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom thou slewest in the valley of Elah, behold, it is here… take it” (1 Samuel 21:9). The weapon that once preached fear waited wrapped behind the ephod—victory laid within reach of worship. In another season, one of David’s men—Eleazar son of Dodo—stood with him “at Pas-dammim” (the very frontier called Ephes-dammim, “border of blood,” in 17:1) where the Philistines swarmed a barley field. When others fled, he stood until his hand clave to the sword, “and the LORD saved them by a great deliverance” (1 Chronicles 11:13–14). Same line. Same door. Same God.

And the giants did not vanish after Elah. In the days that followed, more sons of the giant fell—one with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot—until that old pride from Gath lay quiet under the feet of the people it had mocked (2 Samuel 21:15–22; 1 Chronicles 20:4–8). The taunt that filled Elah did not rise again.

Now the two sermons can be heard clearly and why both sounded so sure of themselves.

Philistia’s confidence rose from forges and coastal wealth, from temples where fallen idols were lifted back to their pedestals, from a tradition of single combat that trained boys to end wars with words before swords. Gath kept the tales of very tall men; a child raised there learned to stride as if the field belonged to the larger and the louder. Armor gleamed because such sermons need light; cadence boomed because persuasion loves rhythm. Goliath named Israel by its smallest story—servants of Saul—and trusted the renaming to hold.

Israel’s certainty had thinned. Saul began small in his own eyes and once prophesied among prophets. But half-obedience dulls the ear. When hearing dims, iron begins to look like salvation. The king measured as soldiers measure and came up short. He put his future on another man, and tried to dress that future with what no longer fit him.

David’s sureness was not bluster; it was habit. Nearness turned into reflex. Fields taught him that God keeps appointments—dew at dawn, stars on time, predators late to dinner. He learned covenant first, then danger. That is why, when he arrived at Elah, he heard a courtroom before he saw an arena. He recognized perjury. His first great line is a question—“Is there not a cause?”—and his next a confession—“I come… in the name of the LORD of hosts.”

The prophetic thread is not hard to see. Scripture calls the giant a champion—literally, the man of the between—the representative who stands in the gap so that the many share in the victory or the loss of one (1 Samuel 17:4). In this threshold, a taunting voice met a covenant voice, and the many were saved because one obeyed what he had already heard from God. Stones once fell from heaven near Azekah in Joshua’s day; a stone from a brook ended a sermon in David’s. In a later day, a stone would be rolled away outside Jerusalem, and another enemy would break beneath a Son of David who faced the tempter with the Word, not with another man’s armor. Thresholds remember how God fights.

—Joshua L Mullins