The way it was told in 1 Samuel 17, it might be difficult to picture how David, a small boy with a slingshot, took out the battle-hardened brute Goliath. However, if this theory about Goliath were true, then David winning was a highly likely outcome, if not a foregone conclusion.
As author Malcolm Gladwell explains in a TED Talk, many mistakenly think that David was just carrying a child's toy. While a slingshot may not sound as impressive as, say, a sword or a pike, it could be an absolute killer in the right hands and with the right ammunition. And David was working with arguably the best bullets available: the stones from Elah Valley were made of barium sulphate, which were twice as dense as ordinary stones. In other words, David's slingshot was a 35-meter-per-second death dealer, hitting his gigantic foe with the awesome power of a .45 caliber pistol.
That's just half of it, though. Goliath may have looked imposing, but the way he was described in the chapter suggests that his gigantic frame may have come at a terrible cost to his health. Gladwell theorizes that Goliath actually suffered from acromegaly, an overproduction of growth hormones due to a tumor on the pituitary gland. This also means that Goliath likely had poor eyesight. As UCLA Health explains, acromegaly can cause a person to lose their peripheral vision, limiting what they can see to what's in front of them.
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