My daughter is crouching in the dirt, examining a snail with the intensity only a child can muster. My son is dragging a rock across the ground, scratching his name into the earth. We are hiking up Tel Azeka on Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. This is how we celebrate here. You go out into the land. You bring your kids. You let them touch the soil and breathe the air and understand, in some wordless way, that this place belongs to them and they belong to it.
As we climb, mountains surrounding us on every side, we pass stone plaques embedded into the hillside, telling the story of what happened here roughly three thousand years ago. Because Tel Azeka is not just a beautiful hike. It is the valley where a shepherd boy from Bethlehem walked out to face a giant and changed history.
Standing there, with the wind coming off the hills and my children scrambling ahead of me on the path, my favorite line from the entire story kept ringing in my ears. David’s words to Goliath, just before the stone flew:
Here is the question that line raises: Why did David win?
The obvious answer is that God helped him. But that answer, while true, stops too short. Plenty of people in the Bible asked for God’s help and didn’t get it — or got it and squandered it. Something was different about David. And to understand what, you have to understand how he saw the battle in the first place.
Every soldier in Saul’s army looked at Goliath and saw a military problem. A massive, armored Philistine warrior, trained from childhood for exactly this kind of combat. The math was not good. No Israelite soldier could win that fight and they knew it. For forty days, the entire army sat in their tents while Goliath strutted across the valley below Tel Azeka, taunting them. Forty days of paralysis, because they were doing the military math and coming up short.
David didn’t do the military math. When he heard Goliath’s taunts, he asked a completely different question: “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” (1 Samuel 17:26). He wasn’t calculating odds. He was offended, genuinely, viscerally offended, that this man thought he could stand against the God of Israel.
This is the revolutionary thing about David. Rabbi Elie Mischel, in his extraordinary course on the Book of Samuel here on Bible Plus, puts it this way: Saul saw a political and military challenge requiring a political and military solution. David saw a spiritual challenge that could only be met through faith. The entire Israelite army had framed the problem wrong. And when you frame the problem wrong, you cannot solve it, no matter how many weapons you bring.
This is what emunah, faith, actually looks like in practice. It is not a feeling. It is a framework. It is the decision to look at reality and ask: where is God in this? What does He want here? And then to act from that place, rather than from fear.
David’s years as a shepherd had prepared him for exactly this. Alone in the fields with his flock, he had fought off lions and bears with his bare hands. Not because he was a superhero, but because he had developed an unshakeable conviction that God was with him. By the time he stood in that valley, the conviction was simply a fact to him, as solid as the stone in his sling.
And there is something else. David’s victory over Goliath was not just a personal triumph. It was a message to all of Israel and to the nations watching about what Israel was. Not just another kingdom with another army. A people whose existence testified to something beyond politics and military strength. When David said “I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts,” he was declaring the identity of the nation he would one day lead.
This is the thread that Rabbi Tuly Weisz pulls on throughout his magnificent three-part course, Who is King David, also available on Bible Plus. David didn’t just defeat Goliath. He breathed a soul into Israel. Saul had built the body, the political structure, the military unity, the beginnings of a monarchy. David came and gave it a neshamah, a soul. He transformed Israel from a nation trying to survive into a people with a mission.
Tel Azeka sits about 45 kilometers from Tel Aviv and 30 kilometers from Jerusalem. It has been inhabited for roughly 3,500 years. The Assyrian king Sennacherib attacked it in 701 BCE, describing it as an eagle’s nest with towers that pierced the sky. The Babylonians destroyed it in 586 BCE, and a soldier at nearby Lachish wrote a desperate message that has survived to this day: “We cannot see any more the fire-signals of Azeka.” This hill has seen empires rise and fall. It has watched conquerors come and go.
And on Yom Ha’atzmaut, I hiked up it with my children, in the sovereign Jewish state, in the year 2026.
If that is not “I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts” written in history, I don’t know what is.
The story of David and Goliath is not ancient history. It is a template. It is what happens when a people stops doing only the military math and starts asking the deeper question. It is what happens when emunah stops being a feeling and becomes a framework for seeing reality.
That framework is what both of these courses are built on. Rabbi Elie Mischel’s Book of Samuel traces the entire arc of this pivotal era in Israel’s history, from the quiet faithfulness of Elkana to the tragedy of Saul to the rise of David, bringing the text alive with the kind of insight that only comes from someone who lives and breathes this land. Rabbi Tuly Weisz’s Who is King David goes deep into the man himself, the shepherd, the warrior, the poet, the king, and shows you why his story is not just Israel’s story but humanity’s story. Together these two courses will change the way you read your Bible.
Both are available right now on Bible Plus for as little as $5 a month when you subscribe annually. That price is going up soon. For the cost of a cup of coffee, you get access to some of the finest biblical teaching being produced anywhere in the world today, taught by Israel-based rabbis and scholars who walk this land and know this text from the inside out. Don’t wait!
