This argument isn’t decisive because the authors in both cases simply say “sons (or descendents) of giants”. Goliath (and his brother Lahmi) would both be decendenst or sons of giants.

So the Goliath referenced here is the same Goliath that David killed.

Elhanan and David are not the same person. And the battle in which this killing takes place is not the same battle as the one where Goliath was killed. So the victim of Elhanan’s spear is not Goliath, but Lahmi, the brother of Goliath.

This is probably a copyist error. This claim raises two issues. First, how does Lahmi get confused with Behlehemite? Second, how does the “brother of” phrase get lost?

Amtiskaw is right about a similarity between Lahmi and Bethlehemite. The first means “my bread” the second means “house of bread”.

There is also a close proximity between the term “ath” which occurs in both accounts and the term “ach” which means “brother” and occurs only in the Chronicles account.

Let us put these threads together. Treating “Jair” and “Jaareoregim” as the same, in Samuel you have (roughly) “Elahanan son of Jair [beth-elchmi ath] Goliath.” In Chronicles you have “Elahanan son of Jair [ath-lchmi ach] Goliath.” It is perhaps a little bit of a streatch, but I can see how a copyist could flub this.

Now consider that “ath” and “ach” look very similar in Hebrew, the copyist might have even thought that he was _fixing_ the passage by making sense of an apparently doubled “ath.”*

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*-The term “ath” and “ach” are not quite as close in Paleo-Hebrew. So for this last part of my argument to work, you’d have to assume a later copyist made the error, and it then propagated to the only copies that have come down to us. We’re not talking about a lot of manuscripts with the OT though.

This might partly explain how the text got changed by accident.