Saul said to David, You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are but a youth, and he a man of war from his youth.
The sling David used was not the toy catapult with which children play, namely, a slingshot. It was an ancient offensive weapon that shepherds also used to control their sheep. Shepherds usually made a sling out of a long, thin strip of leather and formed a pouch in its middle. Talented slingers could propel small objects hundreds of feet at very high speeds with great accuracy (cf. Judges 20:16). [Note: Unger’s Bible Dictionary, 1957 ed., s.v. "Armor, Arms."] Pictures of slings and stones from this time show the stones typically being from two to three inches in diameter. [Note: See Ovid R. Sellers, "Sling Stones in Biblical Times," Biblical Archaeologist 2:4 (1939):41-42, 44.] Probably David’s stones were about the size of a modern baseball or even larger. David beat Goliath, not with the weapons of a warrior, but with the tools of a shepherd. Critics of the Bible have tried to prove that David did not really kill Goliath as the Bible says. [Note: Norvelle Wallace Sharpe, "David, Elhanan, and the Literary Digest," Bibliotheca Sacra 86 (July 1929):319-26, rebutted such an attempt.] 