hi tricocloud

you could be right, but it's a bit late in the day to be sure, the Bible is probably as vague/wrong about the type of sling as it is about various other things.
the thing is, in remote parts of the world shepherds still use slings as they have done for 1000s of years and as far as i know, these are all variations on the usual sling - not staff slings.
since david was a shepherd before he discovered his military and political genius, it's safe to assume that he was an adept with the sling which is still favored by today's shepherds, for it's lightness (less hassle to carry) and ability to work with small stones at low power. staff slings were, according to records, military weapons of some size with a typical large projectile - it's one thing to dissuade a sheep from straying, another to crush it's skull like an eggshell
you might be right, but on balance it's more likely that since D was a shepherd he used a shepherd's sling (like shepherds still use) and not a staff sling (which they don't)

welcome to the forum 

SV



   

interesting... D's weapon could have been a combined staff and staff-sling i suppose

SV

I have also wondered why only a staff gets mentioned and not the actual sling. Prior to reading SV's proposal that David had concealed it I had assumed that the sling was not regarded as a viable weapon by military men of the time. When David is convincing Saul to let him battle Goliath the sling is not mentioned at all. However I think it unlikely the staff was actually a staff sling. As previously mentioned staff slings were somewhat unwieldy, used in siege situations and David is recorded as running towards Goliath so unlikely to be effectively able to use such a tricky weapon. There is no doubt he would have the power to kill Goliath with an ordinary sling; just look at TechStuf "killing" his plywood Goliath.

As for what he did with his staff, I think the simple anwer is that he merely dropped it. Once Goliath was in range, he simply committed himself to his sling and jettisoned unnecessary equipment. Soldiers routinely do that kind of thing.

not unless you hit them on the head with the staff part :-)

It's an interesting diversion - but pretty much a dead certainty that no staff sling was involved.

Yes, the rod and staff solve the "sticks" problem nicely, and the proposal that D simply dropped the staff seems like a good suggestion as to what he did with it/them while slinging. (If a staff sling is unwieldy, then carrying a staff while slinging strikes me as even more so.)

That David's slinging made an impression on Goliath is probably the only dead certainty here. But I'm finding the hypothesis of a staff sling harder to sustain, no question.

I'm in the Non staff sling camp on this one. My weak arguements are follows. First recording we have of the staff-sling is in Xenophons March of the ten thousand. ( as relayed to me by some of my greco-roman reenactor buddies)

The second dates from when I was file mining JSTOR.  There was an article dating from early 20th century about David and Goliath. the article was about the story Of David being extremely similar to other heroic stories of the smae time period.  I glaced through the article and went on looking for other articles that were more about the slinging than interperting the story based on whatever biblical translation.

As in it wasn't what i was looking for i didn't pay a whole lot of attention to it and honestly way to much time has passed. but basically everything had a symbolic role in the story including the staff.

Now if you are really serious about figuring this out, you need to learn ancient Greek and Aramaic. and find out the exact word of what was recorded in the story. too many translations have passed to trust any  modern renditions. I found this out on my Balearic paper when i found out depending on the translation each version of the same story varied in small details. It is these details that may make or break a story.

In short we are talking about an agricultural pastoral society in a military pickle ( so to speak). the evidence is on the side of a David using a standard hand sling.  The same hand sling used by other pastoral cultures from the same kind of society.

Staff slings are a strictly military weapon, as far as we have been find out. and even assuming that they were around during this time period if david wass going to use a military weapon against Goliath there were plenty other out there that would have been more effective than the sling. Now the story would have remained the same even if he had used a sword , or a spear against Goliath.

Marc Adkins 

Winkleried, you may indeed be right about the nature of the sling. But since this forum has academic aspirations, here's some more information:

1) The language in question would be Hebrew, and the word in question for "sling" is qela. In fact I have studied it, though it's been a while. The Septuagint (Greek) is a much later translation. Aramaic was what Jesus spoke; Aramaic script was current at the time in question, but not what this text is written in.

2) The biblical accounts associate the sling with both military and pastoral use.

3) So also for the word used for staff, including just a couple of chapters earlier. It's a very generic term.

4) Your point about recorded military use of the staff sling strikes me as the most important point. Point taken, even though, strictly speaking, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And there is no question that whatever David used, the account strongly implies that it was the same weaponry that he was familiar with as a shepherd.

5) In a subsequent account, we read that David's men could sling with both right and left hands. (1 Chronicles 12:2) I know lots of baseball players that can bat either way. All lacrosse players do. Do you know of slingers that can go either way with any effectiveness? That's not a rhetorical question; maybe they do, for all I know.

6) Whatever D used, it's hard to see what other weapon could have been more effective; he knew what he was doing in going with it!

Quote:


but he doesn't mention a sling

mystery solved - and to suggest that Goliath didn't/wouldn't recognise a sling doesn't make sense, he was supposedly the best soldier available and therefore a weapons expert, as most keen soldiers are.  he would have instantly recognised a sling, staff or otherwise, and spotted the danger.
david was apparently armed with a staff - a quarterstaff was/is a respectable weapon in any case, so goliath wasn't too suspicious. but the sling which he kept hidden (not possible with a staff-sling) until he was within range was the decisive weapon. 

SV