Your servant struck both the lion and the bear: and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be as one of them, seeing he has defied the armies of the living God.
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.] 