a top-ranking officer: a soldier of the highest grade, serving with a king's chariot force or at the king's own side.
This word names a rank, not a job. Wherever it appears, it marks men at the top of a royal fighting force: the ones who go out with the chariots, the one who stands close enough to the king that the king leans on his arm, the tier of the establishment listed alongside commanders (שַׂר) and governors (פֶּחָה) when an army is put on parade.
Three settings cover nearly every use.
- Chariot forces are staffed with them, and Pharaoh's are the ones drowned in the sea.
- A king or a commander keeps one as his personal officer, named as his own man.
- Official lists count them as a class, whether in Solomon's standing army or among the Babylonian troops Ezekiel describes.
The name looks built from the ordinary word for "three," and the oldest explanation of it is that the man was the third member of a chariot crew, riding behind a driver and a fighter. That origin is debated, and it may say nothing about what the men actually did by the time the Bible was written. What the word does say, consistently, is that these are the best troops a king has and the ones nearest to him.
Nuances
Whether 2 Samuel 23:8 calls David's leading warrior the chief of the officers or the chief of the Three.
- majorityRead "the Three": the consonants should be repointed or lightly emended to the numeral, since the surrounding list is organized around the Three and the Thirty, and the parallel in 1 Chronicles 11:11 shows the same confusion.; P. Kyle McCarter Jr., II Samuel, Anchor Bible (1984); HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. שָׁלִישׁ
- minorityKeep the received reading "chief of the officers": the title is a real rank used elsewhere for the highest officers, and no change to the text is needed.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. שָׁלִישׁ
How to read the word in Proverbs 22:20: as "excellent things," as the numeral "thirty" introducing thirty sayings, or as the written consonants meaning "formerly."
- majorityRead "thirty": the consonants are vocalized as the numeral, so the line announces the thirty sayings that follow, matching the thirty chapters of the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope.; Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10-31, Anchor Yale Bible (2009); Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 15-31, NICOT (2005); HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. שָׁלִישׁ
- minorityRead "excellent things": the word is the officer title stretched to what is of the highest grade, so the writer claims to have written counsel of the first rank.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. שָׁלִישׁ; Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Proverbs of Solomon (1873)
Disputed
What the officer title originally designated: the third man in a chariot crew, or a senior rank whose name has no surviving link to the number three.
- majorityThe third man in a chariot crew, riding with a driver and a fighter, a role attested in Egyptian and Neo-Hittite depictions, from which the word came to mean a high officer generally.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. שָׁלִישׁ; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. שָׁלִישׁ
- minorityThe chariot explanation is doubtful, since three-man crews are poorly attested for Israel and Judah, and the term is better taken simply as a senior officer's title of uncertain derivation.; B. A. Mastin, "Was the šālîš the Third Man in the Chariot?" in Studies in the Historical Books of the Old Testament, VTSup 30 (1979), 125-154