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/
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
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.
Harsh, but fair.
glad i saw this before making a nearly identical reply of poorer quality lol
Rejoice! For we are truly entering the age of bullshit. No longer will our supply be limited by the number of humans with more confidence than intellect and humility. Soon we will all be blessed with an inexhaustible supply of that sweet excrement. Directly from Lord Chatbot’s mouth to your ear.
Ah but without him, how would AI know how to output bullshit? After all it’s people like him they feed off of to regurgitate
I've been sympathetic to the artists whose life's work was fed to the plagiarism machine but somehow I neglected to pour one out for the bullshitters. My mistake, I will try to learn from it and become a better person now.
Even without any particular expertise, parts of his account seem highly suspect. Like claiming that talking about sticks in the plural suggests double vision.
I'm no expert in ancient languages or rhetorical conventions (or what it says in the Hebrew), but it seems like a deliberate device: Goliath is derisively comparing David to a dog, suggesting that carrying sticks around is something he routinely does, and with as little utility as when a dog does it
Even ignoring that, the double vision story really doesn't stand up to me. People with double vision still know how many arms someone has. If you cross your eyes and look at someone holding a staff, you won't suddenly see someone holding a bundle of sticks; you'll see two staves on one side.
I enjoyed this
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.
Gladwell is human LLM
he thinks airplanes take off with the wind, not into it. enough said
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
i really do wonder how much that particular little trend in the 00s could be directly blamed for many of the worst things happening to us right now
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.
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.
Hey, Gladwell is a lot like Ai in that way
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
The whole thing is stupid even within itself. In his telling after David fells him the Philistines run away in terror. If Goliath is a feeble, half-blind chump, wouldn't they know that? Why would they be scared that he lost? Why would they send him out in the first place?
That is his whole schtick, across so many fields of learning. Always good to see his posturing faux-expertise demolished by actual experts.
The guy hasn't even played Age of Empires, that's his level.
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...
If you keep studying maybe you will find your answer
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
Reminds me a younger me when I was a young student, trying to fool people with concept I barely grasped. What amazed me is how people like to be fooled by what I call, "demi habile". We used to be clever?
This is, to be fair, the main skill some universities teach you. :)
which is ironic, given the premise of Blink
Ah, so you could tell in a …. “Blink”? How curious /ENORMOUS SARCASM GLADWELL SUCKS
I like Gladwell's Revisionist History pod. Just saying.
Even the one he did recently that was a defence of Paw Patrol?
Haven't listened to that one 😀
This even has a name, rationalwiki.org/wiki/Igon_Va... so notorious is this character
Well... Pinker would know a bit about that alright
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
Ouch. It burns . He deserves it.
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.
To be fair, the sword is a sidearm in many armies; Goliath would presumably first resort to his spear.
Sure, but the sword is used as the main symbol of war in preference to the spear, hence הלנצח תאכל חרב.
I mean if we're talking historical arms, it's more plausible that a warrior like Goliath would be armed with a spear (isn't he described as armed with a great spear?) than a sword as his primary symbolic weapon; the spear and shield in the Mediterranean in this period are a warrior's main arms.
(To non-Hebrew speakers: like Latin, Hebrew is double-marked. But the accusative preposition is only used on definite nouns, and also the 2p-sg.-m. and 3p-sg.-f. conjugations are always the same in the future tense. So this means either "will you forever eat sword?" or "will a sword forever eat?".)
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
