Digging deeper

Goliath’s Skull Found in Holy Land!

Mark kindly emailed me a link to Ben Witherington III’s blog post of 27 January 2011: ‘Finally, Archaeological Proof– Goliath Got Stoned’.

In the post, Ben Witherington digs up the following ‘proof’ of Goliath’s existence, from the 25 May 1993 copy of The Weekly World News, a publication which claims to be  “The World’s Only Reliable Newspaper”:

Weekly World News, 25 May 1993

The Weekly World News, for those of you who haven’t encountered it, is famous for stories about Elvis sightings, aliens, human-bat hybrids, and various supernatural beings…not to mention the odd Giant. It seems the story was later picked up and published as though it were a genuine archaeological discovery inThe Kingdom Times (Belfast; May 1994), a publication of the British Israelites. BW3 was having wee joke with us, you see.

Here is the story from inside the Weekly World News (but how did Goliath’s skull get back to the Valley of Elah from Jerusalem?):

Weekly World News, 25 May 1993

I wonder about the identities of the unnamed  “top Bible scholars” who confirmed the story. Could it be that the Weekly World News article was, in fact, the first joint publication from Provan, Long and Longman?