The next hilarious wrong thing is Gladwell mumbling about how slingers were so good they won a bunch of battles (9:01 for the curious) and you can tell he's mumbling it because he doesn't know any actual battles and doesn't have any examples. To be honest, there aren't many. 15/
God he’s fucking useless
Now I'm curious about the few battles you had in mind where slings were decisive... (I can only come up with Cotta in Caesar's Gallic war being hit by a slingshot in his defeat by Ambiorix, but I don't think that a good example.)
Slingers were valuable auxiliary troops, but they weren't battle-winners. Infantry with armor and shields could and regularly did march straight through sling volleys into contact - slingers could not prohibit a heavy infantry advance. They often couldn't prohibit *light* infantry. 16/
He's treating slings like super-weapons, but these were the poor man's weapon (or the poor tribe's weapon) - dangerous in skilled hands, for sure, but if you could fight basically any other way, you did. 17/
Next up we have Goliath wearing "100 pounds of armor." And 1 Samuel 17:5 does say his armor weighs 5,000 shekels; I can't engage with the original Hebrew (I don't read that), but I feel very safe taking this as an exaggeration or - perhaps - a statement of monetary value (worth, not weighed). 18/
The shekel's weight value varied a lot in antiquity (7-14g usually), so 5,000 shekels could be anywhere from 37kg to 70kg (80-150lbs). For comparison, the Dendra panoply, a full-body bronze (Mycenean) armor, masses around 18kg. Full early modern plate armor is usually c. 25kg. 19/
So at the low end of shekel weight Goliath's armour is 50% heavier than the Deandra panoply. But taking into account that Goliath is bigger than ordinary people maybe that's not crazy? (Also: Is the panoply weight complete? Would there have been padding and arm protection which hasn't survived?)
There's at least one greave, with possibly a second and a pair of arm guards among the bronze that didn't survive time as well as the rest of the suit. A recreation tested last year was 23 kg, and it might have been slightly enlarged because the original is sized for someone 5'8" and 140 lbs.
The recreation had a pair of greaves and a pair of arm guards.
Yes, but would that really be it? No cloth padding on the whole arm, and under the braces, and under the cuirass? That's not a rhetorical question, IIUC it varied between cultures.
the biblical account also has his spear *point* - not the entire spear - at 600 shekels, or 4-8kg a zweihander is about that many *pounds* throw in the square-cube law and he's telegraphing his attacks like a soulslike boss in bullet time how seriously can we take any of these numbers?
Probably about as seriously as Guan Yu's 48 kilogram halberd in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
So either the author is using a really light shekel and the armor isn't 100lbs but more like 60lbs or the author is wildly exaggerating and the armor still isn't 100lbs. Accepting such a figure without question tells me Gladwell doesn't know s*** about arms or armor. 20/
We do need to take Goliath's (presumably also exaggerated) size into account here, of course
But the cherry on the top of this incompetence Sunday is Gladwell's confusion that Goliath has an 'attendant' walking before him out on to the battlefield - from which he deduces Goliath may be disabled. But attendants of this sort are really common for aristocratic warriors! 21/
In this case, it's explicitly a shield-bearer (the Greek has to use a circumlocution for this concept, but from what I can tell the original Hebrew is explicit that this guy is a shield-bearer, rather than a general-purpose attendant). That's a standard kind of battlefield combatant. 22/
You can see these sorts of shield-bearers in ancient artwork, especially Neo-Assyrian artwork (fairly close, chronologically, to this event), who work in pairs with specialist missile troops (and note the text pulls out Goliath's javelin). Just a super-duper common kind of guy on a battlefield. 23/
So no, the point of the story is not that Goliath was disabled and needed to be led by the hand (he was, in the oldest manuscripts, only 6'9") but that, as Thucydides would centuries later wryly note, sling bullets and arrows don't kill the best or worst but just who they happen to hit. 24/
He could block a sling bullet with a shield! but either Goliath didn't lift his shield in time or else - aristocrat that he was - he left it with his attendant thinking this seemingly unarmed young man was no threat. Arrogance married with ignorance is a killer; Gladwell ought to know well. 25/
The Hebrew (loosely transliterated) is "nosei hatsinna," or "bearer of the shield." Both words have alternate meanings but in context those are what make sense.
Can't wait for Gladwell to weigh in on batmen
The original Hebrew literally translates to “the man carrying the shield,” with צנה generally used to denote a heavy shield. Interestingly, Isaac Abarbanel (15th C Sephardi commentator) notes re: that verse that Goliath couldn’t walk far bc his armor was heavy. I doubt Gladwell read Abarbanel though
oh my gooooodddd this is the only bit that crosses over with my expertise at all and this is Naomi Woolf levels of ermagod
Lmaoooooo what! Like lots of stuff requires any actual knowledge (googling armor weights) but an attendant during battle meaning someone is disabled (while wearing 100lb armor?) Is so fucking funny.
oh wow this one in particular is as bad as that one guy who said that nobody goes with their parents to events so the wedding at cana must have been jesus's own
He seems like he would be flummoxed by the idea of knight having a squire
maybe not if the squire was also working the winch on a crane
en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%9E%... Mishqal is the word used. It does mean weight, but simply put, this part of the Bible is not historical. The royal *House* of David is attested much later in history, but that's all.
Pretty interesting: the Septuagint of this story lacks a bunch of content that is there in the Masoretic Text, but this bit is there too. Only in the Greek, it's 5000 shekels of bronze *and iron*. Not sure what to make of that.
Would light infantry just shrug off the impacts/casualties of slinger attack? I seem to remember light infantry definitionally don't have shields (and certainly not meaningful armor), right?
Often they carried smaller shields they might use to deflect incoming projectiles, like the pelte of the peltast or the parma of the velites.
Was about to mention the peltasts and of course you beat me to it 😉