David and Goliath

Hollywood often makes a mess of things when it takes on the Bible. Its multiple renditions of David’s battle with Goliath are frustrating. More than once it has portrayed David as a timid boy approaching the giant, while reciting his own Psalm 23. None of that is textual. When the Philistines, the Israelites’ mortal enemies, “gathered their armies together to battle” (1 Sam. 17:1), they