David and the Giant in the Valley of Elah

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Full script

There is a boy standing in a dry valley, and he is holding a stick and a bag of stones.

On the hill to his left there are some thousands of men in bronze, and on the hill to his right there are some thousands of men in leather and wool, and all of them have stopped what they were doing to watch him. Across the valley, coming down the slope with a man walking in front of him carrying his shield, there is something that looks more like a building than a person.

The boy does not look frightened. He looks, if anything, like someone who has just remembered an errand.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is from the first book of Samuel, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and we will tell it straight, as it is written. The grumbling of the soldiers, the weather and a few small thoughts of a shepherd and his brother are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and we will tell you at the end which parts those were. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

Let me start with a hill, and a very long argument.

The country is the hill country of Judah, a few hours' walk west of Bethlehem, where it begins to fall away towards the coastal plain. This is border country. On one side live the people of Israel, who have a king called Saul and a covenant with the Lord. On the other side live the Philistines, who have five great cities near the sea, iron weapons, a great many chariots, and a long-standing habit of coming up the valleys to see what they can take.

The two armies have come to a place called Socoh, and they have made camp on two opposite hills. Between them is a valley, and the valley is called Elah, which is the name of a kind of tree. A stream runs along the bottom of it, and the stream has, as streams in that country do, a bed full of smooth round stones.

Now, I would like you to picture something that is not much like the battles in the films. Two armies on two hills, with a valley between, and neither one wants to be the first to go down into it. Whoever goes down has to climb up again on the far side, with the other army above them. It is a bit like two cats on two garden walls. Each of them is quite sure it could win, and each of them has noticed that the ground between them is not on its side.

So they sit. They sit, and they look at one another, and they cook their dinners, and they sharpen things that are already sharp. And this goes on for a very long time. The book is careful about how long, as you will hear.

And then, every morning, something new begins to happen.

A man comes out from the Philistine camp. The book gives his name: Goliath, from the city of Gath. And the book is also quite careful about describing him, in the way that you might describe an unusually large lorry that has come to a halt outside your house.

He is very tall. Our oldest Hebrew text gives his height as six cubits and a span, which is about nine feet, or a little under three metres, and which is taller than any door you have ever walked through. Some very old copies say four cubits and a span, which is about six and a half feet, and is still the tallest man in any room. We will say more about that at the end. For tonight, I would ask you only to imagine that he is very, very large.

He wears a helmet of bronze, and a coat of mail made of scales, and the book tells us that the coat alone weighed five thousand shekels, which is something like a hundred and twenty pounds, or fifty-five kilograms. He has bronze armour on his shins, and a bronze javelin slung between his shoulders. His spear has a shaft, the book says, like a weaver's beam, which is the great wooden bar on a loom, and the iron head of it weighs six hundred shekels, which is about fifteen pounds. And in front of him walks a man whose only job is to carry his shield.

I find the shield-bearer rather touching. Imagine being that man. Every morning you get up, you put on your helmet, you pick up the very large shield, and you walk down into the valley in front of somebody who is shouting. You cannot be any good as a fighter, because you have a shield in both hands. You cannot run. You can only walk in front, and hope that the person behind you keeps his temper.

And what does Goliath shout?

He stands at the bottom of the valley, and he calls out to the ranks of Israel. The book gives us his words, and they are really quite reasonable, which is the strange thing about them. He says, why do you come out to draw up for battle? Am I not a Philistine, and are you not servants of Saul? Choose a man for yourselves, and let him come down to me. If he is able to fight me and kill me, then we will be your servants. But if I prevail against him and kill him, then you shall be our servants and serve us.

That is a proposal. It is a rather old one, in the history of the world: let one champion from each side settle it, and spare everyone else the trouble. It is the kind of thing that sounds quite sensible, up until the moment you see who is proposing to be the other champion.

And then he says the thing that is not reasonable at all. He says, "I defy the ranks of Israel this day. Give me a man, that we may fight together."

Defy. That is the word the book uses, and it is a word for pulling a face at someone. Goliath is not only offering a fight. He is mocking an entire army, and he is, though he does not understand this, mocking the God of that army, too.

The book says that when Saul and all Israel heard those words of the Philistine, they were dismayed and greatly afraid.

Now this goes on for forty days.

I would like to say that again, because it is the part that is easy to read over. Forty days. Every morning and every evening, the book says, the Philistine came forward and took his stand. Forty mornings and forty evenings. So eighty times, or thereabouts, an enormous man walked down into a valley, in front of two armies, and said the same thing, and eighty times, no one answered.

I think you and I could imagine what that did to a camp. By about the tenth day, I should think the soldiers had stopped looking up. By the twentieth, I think they were making jokes about it, the way that soldiers do, the way that anybody does when they are very frightened and have nothing to do. By the thirtieth, I think there was a sort of grey quiet in the whole army, the quiet of a lot of men who are each privately thinking about whether it ought to be him, and who have each privately decided that it ought not.

And Saul was their king. This is the same Saul who is a head taller than any other man in Israel. Do you remember? When he was first chosen, the book says that he stood head and shoulders above all the people. If anyone in that camp was built to go down into a valley and face a giant, it was Saul. And Saul does not go.

I do not say that to be unkind to him. I say it because it is the heart of the matter. The one man in the whole army who is most obviously the right shape for the job is afraid. And the book lets us see that, quite plainly, and does not hurry past it.

Now I am going to leave the valley for a little while, and go down to Bethlehem.

There is a man called Jesse, who is old by now, and who has eight sons. Three of the eldest have gone off to the war with Saul. They are Eliab, who is the eldest, and Abinadab, who is next, and Shammah, who is third. The youngest is called David, and he is, at this point, a good deal younger than the others, and he has not been taken to the war at all.

If you have been listening to this show for a while, you may remember that we have met him before, briefly. Some time earlier, the prophet Samuel had come to Bethlehem, looking for the man the Lord had chosen to be the next king. He had looked at all of Jesse's elder sons, one after another, and each time the Lord had said no. He had said, the Lord does not see as man sees. Man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. And then Samuel had asked, are these all the sons you have? And Jesse had said, well, there is still the youngest. He is keeping the sheep.

They had sent for him, and he had been anointed with oil in front of his brothers, and the book says that the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward. And then what did David do? He went home, to his father's sheep.

I like that very much. Nothing in the book suggests that he told anyone to start calling him majesty. He had been anointed as a king, and the next morning he was still a boy who had sheep to look after.

Now, he has also had one other brief appearance at court, which I should mention. Saul had been troubled by a spirit of distress, and his servants had suggested that he find someone to play the harp for him. And someone had said, I have seen a son of Jesse of Bethlehem, who is skilful in playing and a man of valour. So David had gone to the palace, and played for the king, and the king had loved him, and when the music was playing Saul had felt better.

But that is a different part of the story. The book tells it in its own way, and for tonight what matters is only this: David goes back and forth. He goes to Saul to play the harp, and then he goes home again to feed the sheep. He is a bit like a part-time courtier. He has two jobs, and the one he is better at is the one that nobody has heard of.

And on a certain morning, his father says to him: "Take now for your brothers an ephah of this parched grain, and these ten loaves, and carry them quickly to the camp to your brothers. Also take these ten cheeses to the commander of their thousand. See if your brothers are well, and bring some token from them."

So I want you to see this, because I think it is one of the loveliest beginnings to any story in the whole Bible. The most famous battle in the Old Testament is about to happen, and the reason that David is there to see it is that his father wanted to send his sons a snack.

An ephah of grain is a good deal of grain, about a bucket and a half. Ten loaves is ten loaves. Ten cheeses is a sensible number of cheeses to take to a man who is in charge of a thousand soldiers and might, with luck, remember your sons when the time comes for sending someone on a dangerous errand. It is a fatherly, practical, slightly nervous errand, the kind of errand a father has when he has three sons at the front and cannot go himself.

And the book says that David rose early in the morning, and left the sheep with a keeper. I like that, too. He does not abandon the flock. He finds someone to look after it first. He loads up, and he goes, just as Jesse had commanded him.

He comes to the camp at the very moment the army is going out to its battle line. They are shouting the war cry. The ranks of Israel and the ranks of the Philistines are drawing up, line against line, on the two hills.

He leaves his bundle with the keeper of the baggage, which is the sensible thing to do with ten cheeses, and he runs to the ranks, and he goes to find his brothers, to ask how they are. And while he is talking to them, the giant comes out.

It is the same as every other morning. The same walk. The same man in front with the shield. The same words. And David hears them.

The book says that when the men of Israel saw the man, they fled from him and were much afraid. And the men are saying to one another, "Have you seen this man who has come up? Surely he has come up to defy Israel. And the king will greatly enrich the man who kills him, and will give him his daughter, and make his father's house free in Israel."

I would like you to hear that, because it is the first mention of a reward. The king has offered a prize. Riches, and the hand of his daughter, and freedom from taxes for a man's whole family. It is a very large prize, and it has been on offer, we gather, for some time. And no one has taken it, because no one has quite managed to believe that he could earn it.

And David, who is standing among the soldiers with his errand still half done, says something to the men beside him.

"What shall be done for the man who kills this Philistine and takes away the reproach from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?"

It is a plain question, and it is the first one anyone has asked. Notice what it is about. David does not say, how big he is, or how heavy his spear. He says, who is he? Who does he think he is? He is not in the covenant. He is not one of the Lord's people. And he is standing in front of the living God's army and making faces.

All the men have been looking at the giant, and measuring him. David has been looking at him, and measuring what he is saying. It is a very different arithmetic.

And the men answer him, kindly enough, I think, and perhaps a little wearily. They tell him what they have told each other. This is what shall be done for the man who kills him. And so on, the reward, the daughter, the freedom.

But there is someone else listening, and he does not like it at all.

The eldest brother, Eliab, hears David talking with the men. And the book says that Eliab's anger was kindled against David. I think there is nothing in the book that is more true to life than this. He turns on his little brother in front of everyone.

"Why have you come down?" he says. "And with whom have you left those few sheep in the wilderness? I know your presumption and the evil of your heart, for you have come down to see the battle."

Now, I should like to stand up for Eliab, for a moment, because I think we are inclined to be hard on him. He is the eldest. He is a soldier. He is, I should imagine, quite frightened himself, and quite ashamed that no one in the whole army has gone down into that valley, and he is tired, and hungry, and a boy from the farm has arrived in the middle of the worst morning of his life and started asking why nobody is doing anything. Anyone would be a bit short.

I think it also stings, a little, because Eliab was one of the sons that Samuel looked at, and passed over. The book tells us that when Samuel saw him, he thought, surely the Lord's anointed is before me. And the Lord said no. Eliab has never forgotten that, I suspect. He has never said a word about it. But it is somewhere in the room.

And David's answer is one of the best in the book.

"What have I done now?" he says. "Was it not but a word?"

And then he turns away, to someone else, and asks the same question again, and gets the same answer.

He does not argue. He does not defend himself. He does not tell his brother that he has been anointed by a prophet, which he could have done, and which would have ended the conversation. He says, what have I done, and he goes on with his question. I think that is a sort of strength that we do not always notice, because it looks so much like ordinary politeness.

Word gets back to the king. The book says that when the words that David spoke were heard, they repeated them before Saul, and he sent for him.

So the boy who came with a bucket and a half of grain is shown into the king's tent.

And he says the thing which I think all the soldiers had been waiting, for forty days, for someone to say.

"Let no man's heart fail because of him. Your servant will go and fight with this Philistine."

Saul looks at him.

I want you to think about what the king sees. A boy, with no armour. A boy who has just been shouted at by his brother. A boy who is, the book will say in a moment, little more than a youth. And Saul says what any sensible king would say.

"You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him. For you are but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth."

And this is exactly right. Saul is not being unkind. He is looking at the figures, and the figures are what they are. David is a boy, and Goliath has been fighting since before David was born, and there is simply no way to make the sums come out in David's favour.

And David does not argue about the sums. He tells Saul a story.

"Your servant used to keep sheep for his father," he says. "And when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock, I went after him and struck him and delivered it out of his mouth. And if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard and struck him and killed him."

I would like to stop here for a moment, because this is a very surprising speech, and the book does not explain it. David has been a shepherd for some years. And in those years, apparently, there have been lions and bears, and he has dealt with them, one by one, out in the hills at night, with nobody watching.

There is no one to tell about it. There is no audience. No one is going to say well done. There is only a sheep, and a boy who decides that he is not going to leave it. He has been doing this, quietly, for a good while, and the king has never heard of it.

And then he says the sentence that I think is the centre of the whole chapter.

"Your servant has struck down both lions and bears, and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, seeing he has defied the armies of the living God. The Lord who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine."

Notice how it goes. He does not say, I am strong. He does not say, I have done this before and therefore I will do it again. He says, the Lord delivered me. The lion and the bear were real, and so was the fight, but the book has David say very plainly who it was that did the delivering.

And Saul, the tall king, who has not had anything to say to this for forty days, says: "Go, and the Lord be with you!"

And then, because he is a king, and because he wants to do something, he does the thing kings do. He tries to help.

He dresses David in his own armour. The book says it quite exactly. He put a helmet of bronze on his head, and clothed him with a coat of mail. And David strapped Saul's sword over the armour and tried walking, and he could not.

I should like you to imagine it. A boy in a king's coat of mail. Saul was a head taller than anyone. The armour hangs off David like a tent. The helmet slides down over his eyes. The sword drags along the floor. He takes a step, and he sways. He takes another, and I should think a number of the soldiers had to look at their feet.

And David says: "I cannot go with these, for I have not tested them."

He takes them off.

This is a very small moment, and I think it is a very wise one. Saul has given him the best thing he has. It is generous, and it is kindly meant, and it is entirely wrong for the job. And David does not say, no, thank you, this is absurd. He puts it on, and he tries it honestly. And only then does he say, it is not for me.

There is a lesson in that, but it is not a loud one. It is something like this: what you have not tested, you do not take into a battle. And what you have tested, in the hills, with the lions and the bears, you can trust.

So he takes his staff in his hand. He goes down to the stream. He chooses five smooth stones from the brook, and puts them in his shepherd's bag, in the pouch he has. His sling is in his hand. And he draws near to the Philistine.

I want to say a word about the stones.

You may have heard people ask, why five? And there have been a great many answers over the years. Some say that Goliath had four brothers, and David was prepared for the lot of them. That is a reading that some later writers have given, and I will not say it is wrong, but it is not in the chapter. Some say five was simply a sensible number for a boy who knows that one shot might miss. That seems to me quite likely. Some say that the number is a picture of something, and the Church's writers have found pictures in all sorts of places, and I am not going to argue with them.

What the book says is this: he chose five smooth stones from the brook. Smooth, because he knew that a rough stone flies badly. From the brook, because the water had done the work of rounding them for thousands of years. They were just lying there, waiting. Nobody had made them for a giant. They were exactly the kind of stone that a boy sees every day on his way to water the sheep.

I like to think that it took him a minute. That he crouched at the stream and picked up one and weighed it, and put it down, and picked up another, and that the whole army was watching a boy choose pebbles. I think that if I had been in the army I should have found that unbearable. And I think David found it rather peaceful. It was, after all, a thing he knew how to do.

Now, the giant.

He is coming on, the book says, and drawing near to David, with the shield-bearer in front of him. And when he looks, and sees David, he despises him.

Of course he does. He was expecting a champion. He was expecting a man in a helmet, someone to take seriously, someone to be properly afraid of. And what comes down into the valley is a ruddy boy, with good eyes and a handsome face, holding a stick.

"Am I a dog," he says, "that you come to me with sticks?"

He curses David by his gods. And then he says the thing which giants in stories always say, and which they never mean to be the last thing they say.

"Come to me, and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and to the beasts of the field."

And now David answers. And I think I will tell it slowly, because this is the speech that the whole chapter has been walking towards.

"You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin," he says. "But I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied."

You come with a sword. I come in the name.

He says what is going to happen, and I will not repeat all of it, because some of it is what the soldiers say before a battle and is not for bedtime. But he says it plainly. He says that this day, the Lord will deliver Goliath into his hand. And then he says why, and the why is the part that matters.

"That all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear. For the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hand."

The battle is the Lord's.

I would like you to notice that it is not a speech about how brave David is. He does not mention himself, except as the one who is standing in the right place. The reason that he is not afraid is that he does not think that it is his fight.

And then it is quick.

The book is very economical about the next part. When the Philistine arose and came and drew near to meet David, David ran quickly towards the battle line to meet the Philistine. He ran. I think that is one of the best details in the whole chapter. The giant is walking, heavily, in all his bronze. And the boy is running towards him.

David put his hand in his bag, and took out a stone, and slung it. And it struck the Philistine on his forehead, and the stone sank into his forehead, and he fell on his face to the ground.

That is all. The book does not stay on it. There is no long description of the fight, because there was no fight. There was one stone. There was a sound, and then the sound of a very large man falling down.

The book says: "So David prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and struck the Philistine and killed him. There was no sword in the hand of David."

And then, because the giant's own sword is lying there, David runs and stands over him, and takes the sword and kills him with it, and cuts off his head. I am going to say no more than the book does, which is that it was done. It was the end of a war, in a hard country, a very long time ago, and we do not need to look closely at it. The book itself moves on in the next breath.

What happens next is the sound of two armies, on two hills, understanding something at the same moment.

When the Philistines saw that their champion was dead, they fled. And the men of Israel and Judah rose with a shout, and pursued the Philistines as far as Gath and the gates of Ekron. The wounded Philistines fell along the way to Shaaraim, and the book says that the Israelites came back from chasing the Philistines and plundered their camp.

There is something very human in this. After forty days of not moving, the army of Israel suddenly goes charging down the valley, and does not stop for miles. They had been waiting for someone to go first. Once he went, they all found their legs.

And David took the head of the Philistine, and brought it to Jerusalem, and put his armour in his tent. I will say a word about that in the notes, because there is a small puzzle in it, and I would rather be honest about it than smooth it over.

Now there is a short, odd passage at the end of the chapter, and I will tell it quickly, because the book tells it quickly.

As David goes out to meet the Philistine, Saul asks Abner, the commander of his army, whose son the boy is. And Abner says that he does not know. And after the fight, Abner brings David to Saul, with the head of the Philistine in his hand, and Saul says, "Whose son are you, young man?" And David says, "I am the son of your servant Jesse the Bethlehemite."

Which is odd, because Saul had known David already. He had loved him. He had had him play the harp. You may well ask how a king can forget a boy who comes and plays for him in his own house.

I do not think anyone has ever answered it to everyone's satisfaction, and I am not going to try. Scholars have noticed it. The oldest Greek manuscripts have a shorter version of the chapter that does not have this puzzle, and we will come to that in the notes. For tonight I would say only this. Whatever Saul remembered or forgot, there is no doubt at all that after this day he knew who David was.

And now the lovely thing, which is the very next verse in the book, and which I would not leave out for anything.

The book says: "When he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul."

Jonathan is Saul's son. He is the prince. He is a grown man, a warrior, and a good one, and he is exactly the kind of man who ought to have been jealous of the shepherd who has just done what he could not. And the book says, quite simply, that his heart was joined to David's. That he loved him. That Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul, and took off the robe that he was wearing and gave it to David, with his armour, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.

Do you see it? Saul's armour did not fit David. Jonathan's gift did. It was given freely, by someone who was not afraid of him. And that, I think, is the nicest thing in the whole of the chapter. It is not the stone. It is a prince taking off his own cloak and putting it round a shepherd's shoulders.

Now. Let me slow down, because it is getting late.

I have thought, over a good many nights, about this story, and why it has stayed in the world as long as it has. Part of it, I suppose, is that we all like the small beating the large. But I think it is more than that.

Look at what was actually in the valley. There was an army that was afraid. There was a king who was afraid. There was a giant who was, in his own way, very afraid, because he shouted every morning for forty days, and a man who is sure of himself does not need to shout. And there was one person in the whole place who was not afraid, and the book is clear on why. It was not that he thought he was strong. It was that he knew whose battle it was.

The Church has read this story in many ways. Some of her writers have seen David as a picture of Christ, who came out from Bethlehem to face an enemy that no one else could face, and who won the victory for everyone else. Others have seen in the giant everything that stands tall and shouts in our own lives, and in the five stones the little ordinary things that the Lord uses. Those are readings, and they are loved and old, and I would not take them from anyone. But they are not in the text. What is in the text is a boy, a brook, and the sentence: the battle is the Lord's.

It is a very quiet night, now, in the hill country of Judah.

The armies have gone home. The Philistines are somewhere down the road towards Gath, and the men of Israel are back in their tents, with more food than they have had in forty days. A fire is burning, I think, somewhere near the place where the baggage was left. And beside it, there is a bucket and a half of parched grain, and ten loaves, and a good number of cheeses, which nobody has had time to eat.

I think that Eliab found them. I think that he sat down, in the end, rather quietly, and broke a loaf, and cut himself a piece of cheese. I do not know what he said to his brother afterwards. The book does not tell us. But I would like to think that it was something kind.

And somewhere in the dark, a boy with a stick is walking back across a valley. He is looking for a keeper, and a flock, and a shepherd's bag to put away. Tomorrow he will be a hero. Tonight he is only very tired, and he has a long way to go.

The stream is still running along the bottom of the valley. There are four smooth stones in David's bag. And on the bed of the brook, in the dark, there are a great many more, exactly like the one that he took.

Now. Notes for the curious.

Everything in tonight's story comes from the first book of Samuel, chapter seventeen, with a little background from chapter sixteen. The camps at Socoh, the valley of Elah, the forty days, Goliath's armour and his challenge, Jesse and his three eldest sons, the grain, the loaves and the cheeses, David's question, Eliab's anger, the meeting with Saul, the lion and the bear, the borrowed armour, the five smooth stones, the speech on both sides, the sling and the stone, the flight of the Philistines, and the question Saul asks Abner, are all in the chapter. The friendship of Jonathan is from the next chapter, verses one to four. The words of David, Saul, Goliath and Eliab are told in plain paraphrase and not word for word.

What we invented is the soldiers' grumbling, the shield-bearer's feelings, the weather, the cats on the garden walls, the fire at the end, and the small thoughts of David and Eliab. The book does not say what Eliab said afterwards, or what David did that night, and we have not guessed in public.

A few details are worth being careful about. First, the height of Goliath. The Hebrew text that most English Bibles follow says six cubits and a span. An older Hebrew scroll found at Qumran, and the Greek translation, say four cubits and a span. Scholars discuss which is original, and we have given both. Second, the Greek translation of this chapter is shorter than the Hebrew in places. Some of the oldest Greek manuscripts do not have the passage where David goes back and forth from the sheep and the passage where Saul asks whose son he is. That may explain the puzzle we mentioned, but the Church receives the whole chapter as Scripture, and we have told it all. Third, the book says that David took the giant's head to Jerusalem, which was not yet an Israelite city in the story, and scholars have noticed that as well. We have mentioned it and left it there. Fourth, in the Greek numbering used by the Orthodox Church, this book is called the first book of Kingdoms. Finally, the readings of David as a picture of Christ, and of the giant as a picture of whatever stands against us, are old and much loved in both traditions, but they are readings, and not part of the text.

That's the story of David and the giant in the valley of Elah, for tonight. If you would like to remember the holy prophet and king David in your prayers, both traditions keep his memory in the days after Christmas, and the Orthodox Church keeps it together with Joseph and James, the brother of the Lord, on the Sunday after the Nativity. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day.

And here is a blessing. May you have a brother who is cross with you and then eats your cheese. May you never be made to wear armour that does not fit. May you know, when you come to a valley, which stones are yours, and may you be given the sense to leave the rest in the brook. May the Lord fight whatever battle is his, and may you be wise enough to let him. And when the giants are shouting, and the whole world is looking at its feet, may you be the one who asks, quite politely, who it is that is making all this noise.

Goodnight, and God bless.

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