Kitah Dalet - 4/30

Last Sunday, Kitah Dalet continued our unit on Samuel, Saul, and David with the story of David’s battle with Goliath. We read the story out loud as a class and discussed questions students had about the material. Next, students were asked to go through the story and underline any writing that told them something about Goliath as a character. We made a list on the board of things we knew about Goliath, and discussed the different ways the Tanakh gives us information about the character (he is physically described, another character mentions something about him, we make an assumption based on the way he speaks, etc.). When we completed our list, we examined it and found (unsurprisingly!) that most, though not all, of the words on the list were negative. We speculated on how the story might be different if it had been written by the Philistines, and students worked in groups to answer (fictionally, but in context) questions about Goliath’s life in order to posit the way in which he might be described if he were being written about by his own people.