1 Samuel 5:8 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

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.”