Elhanan son of Jair
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The biblical
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 Elhanan son of Jair (variant forms "Jaare-Oregim" in 2 Samuel 21:19, "Jesse" in 1 Samuel 17:12) is believed by conservative Bible scholars to be an earlier name of David
David
David was the second king of the united Kingdom of Israel according to the Hebrew Bible and, according to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, an ancestor of Jesus Christ through both Saint Joseph and Mary...

, who later became the second King of Israel. (See also Elhanan son of Dodo
Elhanan son of Dodo
The Biblical Elhanan was the son of Dodo . He was a member of King David’s elite fighters known as The Thirty.- Interpretation :...

.) In the ancient world it was common for people to be known by one name at one time in their lives and to be known by another name or names at later times (see retroactive nomenclature
Retroactive nomenclature
Retroactive nomenclature is the telling of the earlier history of a person, place or thing while referring to said person, place or thing by a name that came into use at a later date.-Names:...

). The name Elhanan is used in 2 Samuel 21:19 where he is mentioned as killing the Philistine giant Goliath and in 1 Chronicles 20:5, where in addition to Goliath he is also mentioned as killing Goliath’s brother Lahmi.

The King James Version of the Bible adds the phrase “the brother of” before Goliath’s name, in order to avoid contradicting the better-known story that David killed the Philistine champion. The insertion is justified by a reference in Chronicles
Books of Chronicles
The Books of Chronicles are part of the Hebrew Bible. In the Masoretic Text, it appears as the first or last book of the Ketuvim . Chronicles largely parallels the Davidic narratives in the Books of Samuel and the Books of Kings...

to Elhanan having killed Goliath’s brother. But some scholars suggest that the name "Lahmi" is created out of the last portion of the epithet "Bethlehemite' (beit-ha’lahmi). Still other scholars assert that the omission of “brother of” in Samuel is likely to be a transcription error.
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