Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Chronicles 18:17

"and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was over the Cherethites and the Pelethites; and the sons of David were chief about the king." — 1 Chronicles 18:17 (ASV)

Cherethites and the Pelethites. — 2 Samuel 8:18. The royal bodyguard, for which office Oriental kings have always employed foreign mercenaries. Josephus calls them the bodyguard (Antiquities vii. 5, § 4). The names are tribal in form, and as the Cherethites recur (Ezekiel 25:16; Zephaniah 2:5) in connection with the Philistines (compare to 1 Samuel 30:14), and the name Pelethites resembles that of Philistines, it is natural to assume that David’s guard was recruited from two Philistine tribes. (Compare to 2 Samuel 15:18, where the Cherethites and Pelethites are mentioned along with a corps of Gittites.) The Targum of Samuel, and the Syriac and Arabic versions of Chronicles, render “archers and slingers.”

Chief about the king. —Hebrew, the first at the king’s hand, or side, a paraphrase of what we read in Samuel: were chief rulers (kôhănîm). Kôhănîm is the common and only word for “priests,” and has just occurred in that sense (1 Chronicles 18:16). In 1 Kings 4:5, as well as here, the term is said to denote not a sacerdotal, but a secular “minister.” But this theory seems to be opposed to the facts of history. Under the monarchy the priests were brought into close relations with the king, owing to their judicial duties; and the chief priest of a royal sanctuary became one of the great officials of state (Amos 7:11; Amos 7:13).

Such a position would be of sufficient importance to be filled by the princes of the blood. The chronicler, writing from the point of view of a later age, has substituted a phrase for the original term that would not offend contemporary feeling. In Samuel, the Septuagint renders “chief courtiers;” the other versions have “magnates,” except the Vulgate, which has “priests.” The Syriac version of Chronicles renders “magnates.”