And Five Little Stones He Took

My Sunday school teacher gave us an assignment last week: Why did David take five stones, not some other number, to his encounter with Goliath?

So I got up this morning, grabbed the old Strong's concordance, and looked for how the number five is used in Scripture. What a treasure trove for this anarchist! I concluded that as seven is the biblical number for godly perfection, five is the number for thuggery.

There were five kings in the Dead Sea Valley, one of which, the king of Sodom, so evil that Abraham refused to accept his generosity. Five Midianite kings opposed Israel in the days of Moses and Balaam, and five Amorite kings opposed Joshua; all of them were likely thugs like Adoni-Bezek, who cut the thumbs and toes off his victims. Perhaps more important to David at the moment, the Philistines had five “lords” over their five main towns, and David may have been announcing his intention to conquer all of Philistia, beginning with Goliath. David, as the anointed of the Lord, was declaring war on the thuggery of the kings of the gentiles, who lord it over their subjects, and their bureaucrats, who call themselves benefactors. David eventually became another thug, but he owned up to it, repented, and was forgiven.

But the clincher for me came when I saw that it was exactly five men from Dan who consulted Micah’s abominable priest on their way to destroy Laish. They were attacking it precisely because it was a city of peace-loving people who minded their own business: quill pigs, as it were.

I also remembered that five has an occult significance. I don’t know what the occult pentangle signifies, but you can see one on the cover of any book on the occult. I find it interesting that military generals mark their rank with pentangle-shaped “stars,” though those stars lack the internal pentagon of the pentangle. But US military operations are coordinated from the Pentagon, the groundbreaking for which just happened to take place on September 11, 1941. Let that date sink in: it was sixty years to the day before 9-11. Within three months, Roosevelt had maneuvered the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor, a support base for US imperialist operations in Asia. (What besides imperialism would station thousands of US soldiers in China in the 1930s?) Since the Pentagon was built, the US has been at war almost continually and (arguably) never defensively.

Power doesn’t corrupt, but it removes the checks against it and allows it to spread. So it is that with the exception of Hezekiah, all kings mentioned in the Bible resort to thuggery at one time or another. Jesus, however, calls his people to lead by service and sacrifice, a much less attractive road, but one that leads to justice, peace, and prosperity.