2 Samuel 21:19 states that 'Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite, killed Goliath the Gittite,' apparently conflicting with 1 Samuel 17's famous account of David killing Goliath, while 1 Chronicles 20:5 gives yet a third version: 'Elhanan son of Jair killed Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite.'

This has a genuine, well-recognized text-critical resolution rather than requiring a strained theological harmonization. 2 Samuel 21:19 (MT) reads, woodenly, that Elhanan 'the Bethlehemite killed Goliath the Gittite,' while 1 Chronicles 20:5, describing the same battle, reads that Elhanan 'killed Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite.' The Hebrew text-critical explanation is a well-documented haplography: the Hebrew for 'the Bethlehemite' is beit hallahmi, and the phrase underlying 'the brother of Lahmi' shares the consonant string lhmy -- close enough, in the unpointed, tightly spaced consonantal script of ancient manuscripts, that a scribe's eye plausibly skipped from one string to the other, dropping 'brother of' and the name 'Lahmi' and effectively transferring Goliath's name into the slot originally occupied by his brother's. This is a recognized crux flagged in standard critical commentaries and text-critical apparatuses (P. Kyle McCarter's Anchor Bible commentary on 2 Samuel and the BHS apparatus both note 2 Sam 21:19 as textually corrupt in the MT), not an apologetic invention. On this reading, Chronicles very plausibly preserves the more complete original text: Elhanan killed Lahmi, Goliath's brother, not Goliath himself, and there is no genuine contradiction with 1 Samuel 17's account of David killing Goliath -- two different Philistine giants killed on two different occasions.

The correction is independently supported by concrete, identifiable, visually explicable Hebrew consonantal confusion, not merely 'maybe they mean something different' -- a strong argument that Scripture's transmission history, examined with the ordinary tools of textual criticism used across secular classical scholarship (Homer, Herodotus), is fundamentally trustworthy and self-correcting via the wider manuscript witness.