He Fell the Wrong Way

I’ve been posting daily Bible illustrations for four months now. One image per chapter, every day, using AI to generate scenes from scripture. This week, a video of David and Goliath crossed 110,000 views on Instagram. I’ve gained over 1,500 followers in a week.

And at least ten people have told me Goliath fell the wrong way.

They’re right. The Bible says he fell forward. My video shows him falling backward. I can read scripture — I do every day. But the spirit of that image wasn’t a forensic recreation of which direction a giant’s body hit the ground. It was a young shepherd standing in front of something impossibly bigger than him, armed with a sling and a rock, and winning.

Someone else pointed out that Goliath was nine feet tall, not thirty. There’s actually theological debate about whether he was nine feet or thirteen. But the point was never the exact measurement. The point was scale. Goliath was over twice David’s height and many times his weight. He was a warrior above all warriors. The exaggerated size in the image captures something a historically accurate rendering might not — how it must have felt to stand at the bottom of that shadow.

Not just David. All of Israel. They stood on those sidelines for forty days, paralyzed. And in an instant, God used a shepherd boy to conquer what an entire army couldn’t face.

That’s what I want people to see. Not a Bible diagram. Not a historical diorama. I want people who have never been exposed to these stories, or who’ve heard them a hundred times but never really pictured them, to see differently. To feel the dust. To sense the weight of the moment.

Will I get every detail right? No. But I’d rather make someone stop scrolling and think about a shepherd boy’s courage and his reliance on God rather than produce a technically accurate image nobody pauses for.

Goliath fell. That is what I was trying to show.

Leave a comment