Elhanan, son of Jair
Elhanan son of Jair-Oregim the Bethlehemite ( "’Elḥānān ben-Ya‘rê ’Ōrəḡîm Bêṯhallaḥmî") appears in 2 Samuel 21:19, where he is credited with killing Goliath. As this contradicts the better-known story in 1 Samuel 17 in which it is the famous David who kills Goliath, the 4th century BC Book of Chronicles explains the second Goliath by saying (20:5) that Elhanan "slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath", possibly constructing the name Lahmi from the last portion of the word "Bethlehemite" (""beit-ha’lahmi"). The King James Bible translators modified 2 Samuel 21:18–19 to make it read as if Elhanan had slain Goliath's brother: "And there was again a battle in Gob with the Philistines, where Elhanan the son of Jaare–oregim, a Beth–lehemite, slew "the brother of" Goliath the Gittite, the staff of whose spear was like a weaver's beam", although the Hebrew text at this point makes no mention of the word "brother"; the medieval Jewish authors of the Targum Jonathan solved the problem by explaining Elhanan as an alternative name for David. However, this makes it difficult to explain why David is called "Elhanan" in verse 19 but consistently "David" in the verses that surround it (15, 16, 17, 21, 22). The most widely accepted explanation is that the storytellers have displaced the deed from the obscure Elhanan to the more famous character, David.
The Bible Unearthed
Although the book of Samuel, and initial parts of the books of Kings, portray Saul, David and Solomon ruling in succession over a powerful and cosmopolitan united kingdom of Israel and Judah, Finkelstein and Silberman regard modern archaeological evidence as showing that this may not be true. Archaeology instead shows that in the time of Solomon, the northern kingdom of Israel was quite small, too poor to be able to pay for a vast army, and with too little bureaucracy to be able to administer a kingdom, certainly not an empire; it only emerged later, around the beginning of the 9th century BCE, in the time of Omri. There is little to suggest that Jerusalem, called by the Bible David's capital, was "perhaps not more than a typical hill country village" during the time of David and of Solomon, and Judah remained little more than a sparsely populated rural region, until the 8th century BCE. Though the Tel Dan Stele seems to confirm that a "House of David" existed, and "clearly validates the biblical description of a figure named David becoming the founder of the dynasty of Judahite kings in Jerusalem", it says nothing else about him.
There are remains of once grand cities at Megiddo, Hazor and Gezer, with archeological evidence showing that they suffered violent destruction. This destruction once was attributed to the 10th century BCE campaigns by Shishak, these cities therefore being ascribed to David and Solomon as proof of the Bible's account of them, but the destruction layers have since been redated to the late 9th century BCE campaign of Hazael, and the cities to the time of the Omride kings.