1 Chronicles 20
Eight verses. The spring Joab takes Rabbah is the spring 2 Samuel records David's affair with Bathsheba, the killing of Uriah, Nathan the prophet, the dead child. None of it is here. The Chronicler covers the whole year in seven words: but David tarried at Jerusalem.2 The silence is deliberate. He writes for Jews back from Babylon, rebuilding on the wreckage of a kingdom that already fell once. They have Samuel for the failure. They need proof the promised throne outlasts disaster.
So he shows them the giants falling. Sippai dies at Gezer. Lahmi the brother of Goliath dies at Gath. A man with twenty-four fingers and toes dies at Gath. Not one of them is killed by David. The closing line is the whole point: they fell by the hand of David, and by the hand of his servants. Paul hands the church the same logic - the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly. The giants keep falling.
Tap any highlighted phrase to jump to the commentary that unpacks it.
People in this chapter
The youngest of Jesse’s sons, anointed in secret by Samuel while still tending sheep. Killed Goliath, served Saul, was hunted by Saul, became king of Judah and then all Israel. A man after God’s own heart who also committed adultery and arranged a murder.
Son of David’s sister Zeruiah; commanded the army through every campaign. Killed Abner in revenge; arranged Uriah’s death at David’s order; killed Absalom against David’s explicit command; backed Adonijah at the end. Solomon executed him at Joab’s request near the altar.
1 Chronicles 20:1At the Time When Kings Go to Battle
1And it came to pass, that after the year was expired, at the time that kings go out to battle, Joab led forth the power of the army, and wasted the country of the children of Ammon, and came and besieged Rabbah. But David tarried at Jerusalem. And Joab smote Rabbah, and destroyed it.
Spring is campaign season1. The winter rains end, the roads dry, and the armies of the ancient Near East move. This is the time of year a king of David's era was expected to be at the head of his men. Joab is. David is not. The Chronicler does not narrate the Bathsheba affair, but he is not entirely covering for his king either; he lets the half-line do quiet work. The man who should have been on the field tarried at Jerusalem, and the whole catastrophe Samuel records grew out of that one wrong location.
1 Chronicles 20:2-3The Crown and the City
2And David took the crown of their king from off his head, and found it to weigh a talent of gold, and there were precious stones in it; and it was set upon David's head: and he brought also exceeding much spoil out of the city. 3And he brought out the people that were therein, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes. Even so dealt David with all the cities of the children of Ammon. And David and all the people returned to Jerusalem.
Verse 3 has been read two different ways for centuries2. The KJV preserves the most literal reading of the Hebrew verb in 1 Chronicles 20:3 - yāsar, “he sawed,” making the scene one of brutal execution. The parallel in 2 Samuel 12:31 uses a verb differing by a single Hebrew letter (resh vs. mem) - yāsem, “he set,” making the scene one of forced labor with iron tools. The majority of modern scholarship reads the parallel in Samuel as the original and treats the Chronicles verb as a scribal corruption; many modern translations (NIV, NRSV, NET) read “set them to work” in both places. The footnote tradition runs both ways. What the text plainly says, in either reading, is that David broke the Ammonite cities completely. He did not merely defeat them; he ended their resistance. Whether the breaking was forced labor or judicial execution is the textual question; that it was an act of conquest as decisive as any in David's reign is not.
1 Chronicles 20:4Sippai Falls at Gezer
4And it came to pass after this, that there arose war at Gezer with the Philistines; at which time Sibbechai the Hushathite slew Sippai, that was of the children of the giant: and they were subdued.
Gezer sits on the Shephelah, the low foothills west of Jerusalem on the road down to Philistia. It was originally Canaanite, one of the cities Ephraim failed to clear in Joshua 16:10, and generations later it is still contested ground. Sibbechai the Hushathite, who wins the day here, is one of David's thirty mighty men (1 Chr 11:29; 27:11). The Bible bothers to record the name of the giant he killed - Sippai - and that small mercy is worth pausing over. God keeps the names. The obscure soldier and the enemy he felled both get written down, which is its own quiet promise to you: the work you do far from any spotlight is not lost on the One keeping the record.
Notice immediately: David does not kill Sippai. The young man who once dropped Goliath is now the king who tarries in Jerusalem, and the work of finishing the giants has passed to his servants. That should comfort you. You do not have to be the famous champion of your generation for God to bring giants down through your hand. The chapter is telling a community back from Babylon exactly what they needed to hear about themselves: the work God assigned the great kings does not die with the great kings. It carries forward through whoever shows up next.
1 Chronicles 20:5Lahmi the Brother of Goliath
5And 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.
The same scene appears in 2 Samuel 21:19, where the text reads “Elhanan… slew Goliath the Gittite” - without the “brother of.” The discrepancy has been carefully examined for centuries. The standard scholarly explanation is that the Samuel text suffered a small scribal accident - the Hebrew et-Laḥmî (“Lahmi”) was misread or miscopied as bêt hallaḥmî (“the Bethlehemite”), and the word for “brother of” dropped out. The Chronicler preserves the cleaner reading: not Goliath, but Lahmi the brother of Goliath. David killed Goliath at the valley of Elah; Elhanan, a generation later, kills Goliath's brother in another engagement. The text is not contradicting the famous youth-of-David scene. It is finishing the family.
The detail about the spear staff is the same one used for Goliath himself in 1 Samuel 17:7. The weaver's beam in an ancient loom was the heavy crossbar around which the warp threads were wound - the giant's spear had a shaft thick enough to need a beam of that scale, with an iron tip massive enough to require it. The verse is telling the reader, by detail, that this is the same kind of warrior as Goliath - the same equipment, the same scale, the same terror, the same end. The brother does not avenge the brother. The brother joins him.
1 Chronicles 20:6-8The Third Giant and the Closing Line
6And yet again there was war at Gath, where was a man of great stature, whose fingers and toes were four and twenty, six on each hand, and six on each foot: and he also was the son of the giant. 7But when he defied Israel, Jonathan the son of Shimea David's brother slew him. 8These were born unto the giant in Gath; and they fell by the hand of David, and by the hand of his servants.
Polydactyly - the trait of being born with extra fingers or toes - is a well-attested genetic condition, occasionally found in particular family lines. The text mentions it because it is the kind of identifying physical feature that proves the man is from the giant line at Gath3 - the same family, the same village, the same Rephaim lineage as Goliath and Lahmi. The detail also makes the warrior more terrifying - extra fingers on each hand mean an additional grip on a spear, an additional strength in the throw. The Bible does not editorialize about his appearance; it just lists the features the way a battle report would.
Jonathan in this verse is not Saul's son and David's closest friend - that Jonathan died on Mount Gilboa decades earlier. This Jonathan is the son of Shimea, David's older brother (1 Sam. 16:9 calls him Shammah, an alternate spelling). He is David's nephew. The detail matters because the Bible is making the chapter's argument visually: the giant-killing has spread to the next generation of David's extended family. David killed Goliath; David's nephew kills the polydactyl giant. The work that started in the valley of Elah is moving through the family and through the mighty men.
Watch how the final sentence shares the credit. Two agents stand inside one clause. There is David, the king who first broke this family in the valley of Elah. And there are his servants, the men who finished what he began. The chapter never ranks them. It does not care whether the killing blow came from the famous hand or the forgotten one; it cares that the giants fell. The throne and the foot soldier end up in the same line of Scripture, doing the same work.
Further study
- Hebrew text with Rashi, Radak, and Metzudat David on the siege of Rabbah, the Ammonite crown, and the falling of the giants of Gath.
- 2 Samuel 11-12 ↔ 1 Chronicles 20Intertextual BibleSide-by-side comparison of the two accounts. The Chronicler retains the bookends (Joab takes Rabbah, David takes the crown) and omits the Bathsheba narrative entirely - one of the most studied silences in the Old Testament.
- Tell es-Safi / Gath ExcavationBible Odyssey (SBL)Aren Maeir's long-running excavation of Tell es-Safi has identified the site as biblical Gath - the Philistine city Goliath, Lahmi, and the polydactyl giant of 1 Chronicles 20 all came from.
- Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient IsraelBrian Doak - Harvard Semitic MonographsThe standard scholarly monograph on the Rephaim - the pre-Israelite warrior-caste remembered in Numbers 13, Joshua 11:22, 2 Samuel 21, and 1 Chronicles 20. Doak places the Gath giants in the context of an Anakim remnant surviving in the Philistine pentapolis.
Where this echoes in Scripture
At the Time When Kings Go to Battle
- 2 Samuel 11:1It came to pass, after the year was expired, at the time when kings go forth to battle… But David tarried still at Jerusalem.The exact verse 1 Chronicles 20:1 is borrowing - and the only one of the parallel chapter the Chronicler keeps.
- Matthew 1:6David the king begat Solomon of her that had been the wife of Urias.Matthew refuses the Chronicler’s silence and puts Bathsheba into the genealogy of Christ Himself.
- Psalm 51:1-4Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness… Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.David’s own naming of the sin in the language of confession - what the Chronicler leaves out, the Psalter preserves in David’s own voice.
The Crown and the City
- 2 Samuel 12:30-31He took their king’s crown from off his head, the weight whereof was a talent of gold with the precious stones: and it was set on David’s head.The parallel account - identical to 1 Chronicles 20:2-3 except for the verb in v. 31 (sawed / set).
- 1 Kings 11:5Solomon went after Ashtoreth the goddess of the Zidonians, and after Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.The same Ammonite deity whose crown David almost certainly took here - and whose worship Solomon would later reintroduce.
- Revelation 19:11-12On his head were many crowns.The crown-transfer at imperial scale - every false king’s crown finally on the head of the true One.
Sippai Falls at Gezer
- Joshua 11:21-22There was none of the Anakims left in the land of the children of Israel: only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod, there remained.Joshua leaves a remnant of the giant-clan in the Philistine pentapolis; 1 Chronicles 20 is finishing the work Joshua left unfinished.
- Numbers 13:32-33We saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers.The original Israelite fear of the giants - answered, in 1 Chronicles 20, eight centuries later, with their funerals.
- 1 Chronicles 11:29Sibbecai the Hushathite, Ilai the Ahohite.Sibbechai is one of David’s thirty mighty men, named here in the broader honor roll.
Lahmi the Brother of Goliath
- 2 Samuel 21:19Elhanan the son of Jaareoregim, a Bethlehemite, slew the brother of Goliath the Gittite.The parallel verse, with the small scribal divergence at the heart of the famous text-critical question. KJV uses italics for “the brother of” precisely to mark the editorial addition.
- 1 Samuel 17:7The staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam; and his spear’s head weighed six hundred shekels of iron.Goliath’s own weapon - the same description applied here to his brother, signaling the same scale of giant.
- Matthew 12:43-45The last state of that man is worse than the first.Christ’s warning about the brother-of-the-giant pattern in a different key.
- Revelation 12:17The dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed.The defeated enemy returns to wage war again - the brother-of-the-giant pattern at the end of the canon.
The Third Giant and the Closing Line
- Genesis 3:15It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.The original promise - the chapter is one small chapter of its fulfillment.
- Romans 16:20And the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly.Paul moves the 1 Chronicles 20 dynamic into the church - the giants fall by the hand of the believer.
- 1 Corinthians 15:25-26For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.The end of the campaign 1 Chronicles 20 is one early chapter of.