Trojan War – Lee Duigon

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To denote the passage of a week in her story, Violet Crepuscular has refrained for a week from writing the next chapter of her epic romance, Oy, Rodney. As a result, she has forgotten the number of the chapter. Her best guess is Chapter CCCLXXIV.

During the week, Willis Twombley, the American adventurer who thinks he’s Sargon of Akkad, has hardly spoken two words. His best friend, Lord Jeremy Coldsore, has begun to worry about him.

“Everything all right, old boy?” Jeremy asks. “You’ve been awfully quiet lately. You’re not worried about the chapter number being wrong, are you?”

“Nah, Germy ol’ hoss, it ain’t that,” drawls Twombley. “It’s this here Trojan War that’s shapin’ up on the horizon. Gonna be a bad one; and the Trojans are allies of mine, so I really ought to do something to help ’em. But I don’t know what. My intelligence has been kinda confused, this past week.” (You can say that again.)

“Uh… Twombley, old son…” Jeremy hems and haws, but finally gets it out, “I hate to be the one to break it to you, but that Trojan War–well, they’ve already had it, haven’t they? And Troy lost. The Greeks burned it to the ground.”

Twombley stares incredulously. “You don’t say!” he cries. “You’re just funnin’ with me, ain’t you?”

“Sorry, old stick, but the war’s over and you’ve missed it. In fact, it happened several thousand years ago.”

“But it waren’t in the newspapers! Holy mackerel! Troy is burned down?” A stream of lurid and objectionable language ensues. Twombley lets out a deep breath, draws his six-gun to make sure it’s loaded, and declares, “Well, it looks like it’s time I shipped the Akkadian army off to Greece and gave them Greeks what for! Damn! I knew that weasel Agamemnon shouldn’t of been trusted! Wait’ll I get my hands on him.”

“His wife and her lover murdered him, old chap,” says Jeremy. Twombley needs some time to take this in.

“Dadburn it,” he said, “it’s this life of exile that I’m livin’, it makes me miss important things. If I was back on my throne in Akkad, this never would of happened! This adventurin’ life, it ain’t proper for a king. But I can’t give it up! I wouldn’t be on that throne for five minutes before one o’ them Babylonian hit squads found me. Look what they did to Julius Caesar! And I told him to watch out for it, too. If he’d listened to me, he’d still be in the saddle.”

Here the chapter ends. It had to end somewhere.

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If we believe the Bible, then the question doesn’t even need to be addressed: of course he was for real. But there are other questions we can ask, whose answers can further illuminate the Bible for us.

Pictured above is a set of Mycenean body armor from Greece, circa 1200 B.C.: this and others like it can be seen in museums. Goliath probably had similar equipment–only his would have been new, well cared-for, and would have shone brightly–one might easily say alarmingly–with reflected sunlight.

Was Goliath a giant? Earlier Biblical texts, such as the Dead Sea scrolls, give his height as “four cubits and a span,” or about six feet nine inches. The NBA is full of guys that tall or taller; but back in the Bronze Age, six-foot-nine would have been much taller than the average full-grown man. Our King James Bible says Goliath was “six cubits and a span,” or nine feet nine inches tall: but that comes from the later Masoretic Texts and may be a scribal error.

Either way, Goliath was probably by far the biggest man in either army; and the armor he wore would have made him look even bigger. Ancient armor had two purposes, not just one: to protect the wearer, and to intimidate his foes. Goliath in new armor would have intimidated most people. Indeed, he intimidated everyone but David.

There’s a lot that we don’t know about the Philistines, including where they originally came from. Their artifacts suggest the islands of the Aegean Sea, or Crete, or the southeastern coast of Asia Minor. The ancient Egyptians called them “Peleset,” one of the Sea Peoples blamed for wrecking Mediterranean civilizations at the end of the Late Bronze Age. We don’t know what the Philistines called themselves.

The Greeks of the Mycenean civilization, the ones who fought the Trojan War, had a custom of settling matters between armies by single combat between each army’s chosen champion: Menelaus vs. Paris, Ajax vs. Hector, in The Iliad (in which neither of those two combats was allowed to go to a finish). Goliath challenges Israel’s army to send out a champion to fight him. His procedure is the same as what we see in Homer–and suggestive of authenticity.

When David killed Goliath, the Philistines panicked and fled. The strictest rules of Bronze Age military etiquette–which were observed by virtually no one–called for the Philistine army to leave off its operations and peacefully retire. But because they ran, the Israelites chased them back to Philistia. We doubt the Greeks would have sailed home from Troy if Paris had succeeded in killing Menelaus… although the rules said they should have.

The Bible provides us with many glimpses into long-lost epochs of history, many of which wind up being further illustrated by archaeological discoveries.

There is nothing in the story of David and Goliath to prevent a reasonable person from believing it.