Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »There was very general agreement among the Muslim authorities that the name was not Arabic, even Rāġib, Mufradāt, 94 […]; cf. also al-Ǧawālīqī, Muʕarrab, 46; LA, ii, 325; TA, i, 535. / Clearly Ǧālūt is an attempt to reproduce the Hbr Gālyaṯ of the OT narrative, of which the Qur’ānic story is obviously a garbled version.¹ Hirschfeld, New Researches, 13, suggested that the Qurʔānic / form is due to Muḥammad’s informant having misread the [Hbr] Gālyaṯ of his MS as Gālûṯ, which of course it was very easy to do, and vowelling it [Hbr] Gālûṯ gave Muḥammad his Ǧālūt. This is very ingenious and has in its favour the fact that the Goliath story occurs only in the late Madina period when Muḥammad was beginning to pick up more and more detailed information from the Jews. It is difficult, however, to think that any Jewish informant skilled enough to read the Hbr text would not have known the Biblical story well enough to have avoided such a mistake, unless indeed he deliberately misled Muḥammad. / Like the Aram glwtʔ (Syr galūṯā),² the word [Hbr] gālûṯ means an exile, and in the Talmud (e.g. Sukkah, 31a), the Exilarch is called ryš glwtʔ, so Horovitz, KU, 106, suggests that this glwt, which must have been commonly used among the Jews of Arabia, may have become confused in Muḥammad’s mind with the Gālyaṯ of the Biblical story, and so have given rise to Ǧālūt. In any case we are safe in attributing the introduction of the name to Muḥammad himself, for no trace of it can be found in pre-Islamic days.³ «
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1. Geiger, 182; Syez, Eigennamen, 44. 2. Which indeed was borrowed into Armenian. Cf. gałowť Hübschmann, Arm. Gramm, i, 301). 3. It occurs in a verse of the Jewish poet as-Samawʔal, but Nöldeke, ZA, xxvii, 178, shows that the verse in question is post-Islamic and under Qur’ānic influence.

west

▪ Not from Ar Ǧālūt but ultimately from the same Hbr source are the Western names for the Biblical giant, e.g., Engl Goliath, 1590s, from lLat Goliath, from Hbr Gālyaṯ, name of the Philistine giant slain by David (I Samuel xvii).
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