ELHANAN ĕl hā’ nən (אֶלְחָנָנ׃֩, LXX ̓Ελεανον God has been gracious=Adeodatus [2 Sam 21:19; 23:24; 1 Chron 11:26; 20:5]) The name of two men in the OT. 1. A Bethlehemite, son of Ja’are-orégim, who in David’s army in the wars against the Philistines at Gob slew (KJV conjecturally adds “brother of” from 1 Chron 20:5) Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear is said to have been like a weaver’s beam (2 Sam 21:19). In Chronicles the father of Elhanan is Jair and his victim is Lahmi the brother of Goliath (1 Chron 20:5).

Conjectural efforts to solve this problem are: (a) Postulate two separate giants named Goliath, one slain by David and one by Elhanan, or postulate that Goliath is a generic name for a class of giants. (b) Assume that “brother of” has fallen out of the text of Samuel. (c) Assume that Chronicles is trying to solve the problem by adding “brother.” (d) Assume with Ewald and Kennedy that a story originally dealing with Elhanan has been transfered to David whose victim previously had been anonymous. (f) Assume from a tradition preserved in Jerome (Quaest. Heb. in Libros Regnum) and the Targum that David and Elhanan are identical. It recently has been widely assumed that David rather than being a personal name is a throne name for Elhanan. Support for this contention from the occurrence of dawidum in Mari texts for a leader now has been shown to be indefensible.

2. Son of Dodo of Bethlehem, one of the thirty mighty men of David who ranked next to the three (2 Sam 23:24; 1 Chron 11:26).

Bibliography A. R. S. Kennedy, Samuel: The Century Bible (n.d.), 300; S. R. Driver, Notes On the Hebrew Books of Samuel (2nd ed., 1913), 354, 355; A. M. Honeyman, JBL, 67 (1948), 23f.; V. Pákozdy, ZAW, 68 (1956), 257-259; J. J. Stamm, SVT, 7 (1959), 167ff.