Who killed Goliath? 1 Samuel 17 vs 2 Samuel 21

The passages

So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and smote the Philistine, and slew him; but there was no sword in the hand of David.

1 Samuel 17:50

And there was again a battle in Gob with the Philistines, where Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim, a Bethlehemite, slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam.

2 Samuel 21:19

And there was war again with the Philistines; and Elhanan the son of Jair slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite, whose spear staff was like a weaver's beam.

1 Chronicles 20:5

The problem

In the King James text, the words "the brother of" in 2 Samuel 21:19 are printed in italics, which signals that the translators added them. The Hebrew reads that Elhanan killed "Goliath the Gittite", with the same detail about the weaver's beam as in 1 Samuel 17:7. Chronicles, written later, reports the same event with "Lahmi the brother of Goliath". So there appear to be two killers of Goliath in Samuel, and a revised version in Chronicles that removes the conflict.

What believers and scholars say

A scribal error that Chronicles corrects. Many conservative scholars argue that 2 Samuel 21:19 was damaged in transmission, and that 1 Chronicles 20:5 preserves the original sense. The two Hebrew texts are close enough in letters that a copying slip is plausible. This explanation preserves David as the killer.

A second Goliath. Another proposal is that Goliath was a family name or title, and that more than one Philistine warrior bore it. The text does not say so.

Tradition transferred to David. Critical scholars, including McCarter, suggest that the older tradition credited Elhanan, a hero from David's own circle, and that over time the great victory was attached to David. Chronicles then harmonized by editing the older text. It is a reasonable reading, and it matches how legends gather around famous figures.

Where this leaves it

The Chronicles version shows that an ancient reader noticed the problem and fixed it. Whether the fix restores the original reading or invents a new one is a matter of manuscript judgment that the evidence supports in more than one direction. Most readers will find that the scribal-error explanation is plausible, and that the legend explanation is also plausible.