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/
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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/
apr 28, 2025, 8:34 pm • 209 4 • view
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/
apr 28, 2025, 8:34 pm • 215 4 • view
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?)
apr 28, 2025, 9:07 pm • 6 0 • view
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.
apr 28, 2025, 10:58 pm • 6 0 • view
The recreation had a pair of greaves and a pair of arm guards.
apr 28, 2025, 10:58 pm • 3 0 • view
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.
apr 30, 2025, 7:03 am • 0 0 • view
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?
apr 29, 2025, 12:57 am • 18 0 • view
Probably about as seriously as Guan Yu's 48 kilogram halberd in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
apr 29, 2025, 1:45 am • 20 1 • view
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/
apr 28, 2025, 8:34 pm • 237 5 • view
We do need to take Goliath's (presumably also exaggerated) size into account here, of course
apr 29, 2025, 4:37 am • 3 0 • view
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/
apr 28, 2025, 8:34 pm • 283 5 • view
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/
apr 28, 2025, 8:34 pm • 242 4 • view
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/
apr 28, 2025, 8:34 pm • 236 5 • view
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/
apr 28, 2025, 8:34 pm • 253 5 • view
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/
apr 28, 2025, 8:34 pm • 353 11 • view
My point in this is that, if you didn't know, Malcolm Gladwell is the sort of person comfortable talking confidently on topics about which he knows less than nothing, while pretending he's found what everyone missed. So you should ignore everything he says (his bomber book is also garbage). /end
apr 28, 2025, 8:34 pm • 652 73 • view
Gladwell seems redundant now that we have A.I. that can output a superficial gloss of plausible words despite being entirely ignorant on every subject.
apr 28, 2025, 8:48 pm • 136 13 • view
Even without any particular expertise, parts of his account seem highly suspect. Like claiming that talking about sticks in the plural suggests double vision.
apr 29, 2025, 8:09 am • 2 0 • view
I enjoyed this
apr 29, 2025, 2:31 pm • 1 0 • view
Gladwell writes things that seem plausible if you don’t know anything about the topic. Then you read him on a topic you understand and realize he’s just making shit up. Happened to me years ago with 10,000 hours and his New Yorker article about teaching.
apr 29, 2025, 12:39 pm • 35 0 • view
he thinks airplanes take off with the wind, not into it. enough said
apr 29, 2025, 6:10 am • 3 0 • view
great example of a type of guy whose sounding smart -schtick worked in the aughts but who then failed to evolve w/ the times but do the same shit 20yrs later.. Michael Lewis, Gladwell, Nate Silver, the new atheist crew, JPeterson, Rogan .. hell even Elon & Zuck & Trump & SAltman all fit
apr 28, 2025, 10:36 pm • 10 0 • view
I emailed him over a decade ago about mass shootings and a chapter he wrote about copycat suicides, and his response was two sentences about violence on TV, and that was when I wrote him off.
apr 29, 2025, 5:36 am • 6 0 • view
Happy to add to the chorus by noting he suggested NBA teams were dumb for not pressing more because he watched a middle school girls team effectively use a hyper press strategy. Also, that team was coached by a billionaire, a former NFL RB, and the RB's former D-I basketball player daughter.
apr 29, 2025, 2:20 pm • 5 0 • view
Hey, Gladwell is a lot like Ai in that way
apr 29, 2025, 5:53 am • 2 0 • view
My favorite part is that when he goes into the bit about the people deducing that it was this tumor, he says that the debate happens "in the medical community", and not the ancient history community
apr 29, 2025, 6:41 am • 3 0 • view
That is his whole schtick, across so many fields of learning. Always good to see his posturing faux-expertise demolished by actual experts.
apr 28, 2025, 8:43 pm • 20 0 • view
The guy hasn't even played Age of Empires, that's his level.
apr 29, 2025, 6:37 am • 3 0 • view
My ex-wife once told me 'You know what your problem is? You sound like you know what you're talking about and people believe you.' I said I took her point, but I didn't quite see how it was *my* problem...
apr 29, 2025, 5:44 am • 6 0 • view
I (briefly, many years ago) dated someone who was really into Gladwell. I speed-read "Blink" standing in a bookstore and then told her I could tell at a glance he was full of crap. She... did not take this well :-D
apr 29, 2025, 4:42 am • 23 0 • view
I like Gladwell's Revisionist History pod. Just saying.
apr 29, 2025, 5:32 am • 1 0 • view
This even has a name, rationalwiki.org/wiki/Igon_Va... so notorious is this character
apr 28, 2025, 9:06 pm • 14 2 • view
the real mystery is not how a scrawny kid with a ranged weapon killed a melee combatant, but how a scrawny kid who couldn’t even lift a sword used one like less than an hour later to cut off a dude’s head
apr 29, 2025, 6:25 am • 11 0 • view
Ouch. It burns . He deserves it.
apr 29, 2025, 5:52 am • 1 0 • view
Important detail in the story: after killing Goliath, David draws Goliath's sword from its sheath. In other words, Goliath did not already draw the sword himself, because he underestimated David and did not view him as a serious threat.
apr 28, 2025, 9:03 pm • 8 0 • view
To be fair, the sword is a sidearm in many armies; Goliath would presumably first resort to his spear.
apr 28, 2025, 9:07 pm • 10 0 • view
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.
apr 28, 2025, 10:27 pm • 8 0 • view
Can't wait for Gladwell to weigh in on batmen
apr 29, 2025, 1:21 pm • 3 0 • view
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
apr 29, 2025, 5:42 am • 2 0 • view
oh my gooooodddd this is the only bit that crosses over with my expertise at all and this is Naomi Woolf levels of ermagod
apr 29, 2025, 4:37 am • 6 0 • view
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.
apr 29, 2025, 5:07 am • 4 0 • view
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
apr 29, 2025, 12:33 am • 4 0 • view
He seems like he would be flummoxed by the idea of knight having a squire
apr 28, 2025, 10:03 pm • 10 0 • view
maybe not if the squire was also working the winch on a crane
apr 29, 2025, 12:46 am • 2 0 • view
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.
apr 28, 2025, 10:11 pm • 10 1 • view
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.
apr 29, 2025, 4:44 am • 1 0 • view