Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 5:8

"They sent therefore and gathered all the lords of the Philistines unto them, and said, What shall we do with the ark of the God of Israel? And they answered, Let the ark of the God of Israel be carried about unto Gath. And they carried the ark of the God of Israel [thither]." — 1 Samuel 5:8 (ASV)

Gathered all the lords of the Philistines to them. — The Philistine federation seems to have been very powerful. Owing to the Israelites’ disinclination towards maritime pursuits and foreign commerce (King Solomon’s foreign commercial expeditions were apparently quite exceptional), the Philistines held in their hands a large proportion of Mediterranean trade.

The Mediterranean was the great highway between Eastern and Western nations, which no doubt led to their worship of Dagon, the fish-god. This worship seems to have been something more than mere “Nature worship”; it was the devotion of the Phoenician settlers on the seaboard 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) were the heads of the several city districts, which formed a confederation. Each of the five chief cities held 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) offers 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.”