What Does 1 Samuel 5:8 Mean?

(8) **Gathered all the lords of the Philistines unto them.**—The Philistine federation seems to have been a very powerful one, and owing to the disinclination of the Israelites to maritime pursuits and foreign commerce—[the foreign commercial expeditions of King Solomon were apparently quite exceptional]—held in their hands a large proportion of the Mediterranean trade—the Mediterranean being the great highway between Eastern and Western nations; hence, no doubt, the worship of Dagon, the fish-god. It seems to have been something more than mere “Nature worship,” the devotion of the Phœnician settlers on the sea-board of Syria and Canaan to a marine deity. The constitution of Philistia was oligarchical: that is, the government was in the hands of a College of Princes, whose decision no individual could oppose. The princes (*seranim*) are the heads of the several city districts, which formed a confederation, each one of the five chief cities holding a number of places, country cities, or “daughter” cities, as its special district. (See Erdmann in *Lange’s Commentary.*) Dr. Payne Smith (Dean of Canterbury) has an ingenious and scholarly derivation for the titular designation of these lords (Hebrew, *seranim*)*, *in which, rejecting the usual root *sar, *a prince, he connects the word with *seren,* a hinge; “just,” he says, “as the cardinals of the Church of Rome take their name from *cardo, *which has the same meaning.”