Dagon was a major northwest
Semitic god, reportedly of grain and agriculture.
He was
worshipped by the early Amorites and by the
inhabitants of the cities of Ebla
and Ugarit
(which was
an ancient city near the Mediterranean containing a large variety
of ancient writings and pagan shrines). He was also a major
member, or perhaps head, of the
pantheon of the Biblical
Philistines.
His name appears in
Hebrew as
דגון (in
modern
transcription Dagon,
Tiberian Hebrew Dāḡôn), in
Ugaritic as
dgn (probably
vocalized as
Dagnu), and in
Akkadian as
Dagana,
Daguna usually rendered in English translations as
Dagan.
Etymology
In Ugaritic, the root
dgn also means
grain: in
Hebrew
dāgān, Samaritan
dīgan, is an archaic word
for
grain.
The Phoenician author
Sanchuniathon
also says
Dagon means
siton, that being the Greek
word for
grain. Sanchuniathon further explains: "And
Dagon, after he discovered grain and the plough, was called
Zeus Arotrios." The word
arotrios
means "ploughman", "pertaining to agriculture".
It is perhaps related to the Middle Hebrew and Jewish
Aramaic word
dgnʾ 'be cut open' or
to
Arabic dagn (دجن)
'rain-(cloud)'.
The theory relating the name to Hebrew
dāg/
dâg,
'fish', based solely upon a reading of 1 Samuel 5:2–7 is
discussed in
Fish-god tradition below.
Etymology: ME LL(Ec) LGr(Ec) Heb dāgān, grain (hence the god of
agriculture) Corn
Non-Biblical sources
The god
Dagon first appears in extant records about 2500
BC in the Mari
texts and in
personal Amorite names in which the gods Ilu
(Ēl), Dagan, and Adad
are especially common.
At
Ebla
(Tell Mardikh), from at least 2300 BC, Dagan was the head of
the city pantheon comprising
some 200 deities and bore the titles BE-DINGIR-DINGIR, "Lord of
the gods" and Bekalam, "Lord of the land". His
consort was known only as Belatu, "Lady". Both were worshipped in a
large temple complex called E-Mul, "House of the Star". One entire
quarter of Ebla and one of its gates were named after Dagan. Dagan
is called
ti-lu ma-tim, "dew of the land" and
Be-ka-na-na, possibly "Lord of
Canaan". He was called lord of many cities: of
Tuttul, Irim, Ma-Ne, Zarad, Uguash, Siwad, and Sipishu.
An interesting early reference to Dagan occurs in a letter to King
Zimri-Lim of Mari,
18th century
BC, written by Itur-Asduu an official in the
court of Mari and governor of Nahur (the Biblical city of Nahor)
(
ANET, p. 623). It relates a dream of a "man from
Shaka" in which Dagan appeared.
In the dream, Dagan blamed Zimri-Lim's
failure to subdue the King of the Yaminites upon Zimri-Lim's
failure to bring a report of his deeds to Dagan in Terqa
.
Dagan promises that when Zimri-Lim has done so: "I will have the
kings of the Yaminites [
coo]ked
on a fisherman's
spit
, and I will lay them before you."
In
Ugarit
around 1300 BC, Dagon had a large
temple and was listed third in the pantheon following a father-god
and Ēl, and preceding Baīl Ṣapān (that is the
god Haddu or Hadad/Adad). Joseph Fontenrose first demonstrated that,
whatever their deep origins, at Ugarit Dagon was identified with
El, explaining why Dagan, who had an important temple at Ugarit is
so neglected in the Ras
Shamra
mythological texts, where Dagon is mentioned solely
in passing as the father of the god Hadad, but
Anat, El's daughter, is Baal's sister, and why
no temple of El has appeared at Ugarit.
There are differences between the Ugaritic pantheon and that of
Phoenicia centuries later: according to the third-hand Greek and
Christian reports of Sanchuniathon, the Phoenician mythographer
would have Dagon the brother of Ēl/
Cronus and
like him son of Sky/
Uranus and Earth,
but not truly Hadad's father. Hadad was begotten by "Sky" on a
concubine before Sky was castrated by his son Ēl, whereupon the
pregnant concubine was given to Dagon. Accordingly, Dagon in this
version is Hadad's half-brother and stepfather. The Byzantine
Etymologicon Magnum
says that Dagon
was Cronus in Phoenicia. Otherwise, with
the disappearance of Phoenician literary texts, Dagon has
practically no surviving mythology.
Dagan is mentioned occasionally in early
Sumerian texts but becomes prominent only
in later Akkadian inscriptions as a powerful and warlike protector,
sometimes equated with Enlil. Dagan's wife was in some sources the
goddess
Shala (also named as wife of Adad and
sometimes identified with Ninlil). In other texts, his wife is
Ishara. In the preface to his famous law
code, King
Hammurabi calls himself "the
subduer of the settlements along the
Euphrates with the help of Dagan, his creator". An
inscription about an expedition of Naram-Sin to the Cedar Mountain
relates (
ANET, p. 268): "Naram-Sin slew Arman and
Ibla with the 'weapon' of the god Dagan who aggrandizes his
kingdom." The
stele of
Ashurnasirpal II (
ANET,
p. 558) refers to Ashurnasirpal as the favorite of
Anu and of Dagan. In an Assyrian poem, Dagan
appears beside
Nergal and
Misharu as a judge of the dead. A late Babylonian
text makes him the
underworld prison
warder of the seven children of the god Emmesharra.
The
Phoenician inscription on the sarcophagus of King Eshmunʿazar of
Sidon
(5th century
BC) relates (ANET, p. 662):
"Furthermore, the Lord of Kings gave us Dor and Joppa
, the mighty lands of Dagon, which are in the Plain
of Sharon
, in
accordance with the important deeds which I did."
Dagan was sometimes used in royal names.
Two kings of the
Dynasty of Isin
were
Iddin-Dagan (c. 1974–1954
BC) and
Ishme-Dagan (c. 1953–1935
BC). The latter name
was later used by two
Assyrian kings:
Ishme-Dagan I (c. 1782–1742
BC) and Ishme-Dagan
II (c. 1610–1594
BC).
Etymology: ME LL(Ec) LGr(Ec) Heb ? dāgān, grain (hence ? god of
agriculture) P.G.
In Biblical texts and commentaries
In the
Tanakh, Dagon is particularly the god of the
Philistines with temples at Beth-dagon in
the tribe of Asher (Joshua 19.27), in Gaza
(Judges 16.23, which tells soon after how the
temple is destroyed by Samson as his last
act). Another temple, in Ashdod
was
mentioned in 1 Samuel 5.2–7 and
again as late as 1 Maccabees
10.83;11.4. King Saul's head was
displayed in a temple of Dagon in
1
Chronicles 10:8-10. There was also a second place known as
Beth-Dagon in
Judah (Joshua 15.41).
Josephus (Antiquities 12.8.1; War
1.2.3) mentions a place named Dagon above Jericho
. Jerome mentions
Caferdago between Diospolis
and Jamnia. There is also a modern Beit Dejan
south-east of Nablus
. Some
of these toponyms may have to do with grain rather than the
god.
The account in 1 Samuel 5.2–7 relates how the
ark of
Yahweh was
captured by the Philistines and taken to Dagon's temple in Ashdod.
The following morning they found the image of Dagon lying prostrate
before the ark. They set the image upright, but again on the
morning of the following day they found it prostrate before the
ark, but this time with head and hands severed, lying on the
miptān translated as "threshold" or "podium". The account
continues with the puzzling words
raq dāgôn nišʾar ʿālāyw,
which means literally "only Dagon was left to him." (The
Septuagint,
Peshitta, and
Targums render "Dagon" here as "trunk of
Dagon" or "body of Dagon", presumably referring to the lower part
of his image.) Thereafter we are told that neither the priests or
anyone ever steps on the
miptān of Dagon in Ashdod "unto
this day".
This story is depicted on the frescoes of
the Dura-Europos
synagogue
as the opposite to a depiction of the High Priest
Aaron and the Temple of Solomon
.
Marnas
The
vita of
Porphyry of Gaza, mentions the great god of
Gaza, known as Marnas (
Aramaic
Marnā the "Lord"), who was regarded as the god of rain and
grain and invoked against famine. Marna of Gaza appears on coinage
of the time of
Hadrian. He was identified at
Gaza with
Cretan Zeus, Zeus
Krētagenēs. It is likely that Marnas was the Hellenistic
expression of Dagon. His temple, the Marneion — the last
surviving great cult center of paganism — was
burned by order of the Roman emperor in
402. Treading upon the sanctuary's paving-stones had been
forbidden. Christians later used these same to pave the public
marketplace.

A modern interpretation of Dagon as a
"fish-god" with wide currency on the Internet.
Derived from the Lovecraftian version of Dagon, an elder god
that is a fish like humanoid.
Fish-god tradition
Three thousand years later, Jewish Rabbi
Rashi
writes of a Biblical tradition that the name
Dāgôn is
related to Hebrew
dāg/
dâg 'fish' and that Dagon
was imagined in the shape of a fish: compare the Babylonian
fish-god
Oannes. In the thirteenth century
David Kimhi interpreted the odd sentence
in 1 Samuel 5.2–7 that "only Dagon was left to him" to mean
"only the form of a fish was left", adding: "It is said that Dagon,
from his navel down, had the form of a fish (whence his name,
Dagon), and from his navel up, the form of a man, as it is said,
his two hands were cut off." The
Septuagint text of 1 Samuel 5.2–7 says that
both the arms
and the legs of the image of Dagon were
broken off.
H. Schmökel asserted in 1928 that Dagon was never originally a
fish-god, but once he became an important god of those maritime
Canaanites, the Phoenicians, the folk-etymological connection with
dâg would have ineluctably affected his
iconography.
Dagon is sometimes identified with
Matsya,
the fish avatar of
Vishnu, who jumped into
the ocean to fight a demon. A statue in
Keshava temple in
Somnathpur, India depicts Matsya as a fish from
the waist down. The fish form may be considered as a phallic symbol
as seen in the story of the Egyptian grain god
Osiris, whose penis was eaten by (conflated with)
fish in the Nile after he was attacked by the
Typhonic
beast Set. Likewise, in the
tale depicting the origin of the constellation
Capricornus, the Greek god of nature
Pan became a fish from the waist down when
he jumped into the same river after being attacked by
Typhon.
Various
19th century scholars, such as Julius
Wellhausen and William
Robertson Smith, believed the tradition to have been validated
from the occasional occurrence of a merman
motif found in Assyrian and Phoenician
art, including coins from Ashdod
and Arvad
.
John Milton uses the tradition in his
Paradise Lost Book 1:
...
Next came one
Who mourned in earnest, when the captive ark
Maimed his brute image, head and hands lopt off,
In his own temple, on the grunsel-edge,
Where he fell flat and shamed his worshippers:
Dagon his name, sea-monster, upward man
And downward fish; yet had his temple high
Reared in
Azotus
, dreaded
through the coast
Of
Palestine, in Gath and
Ascalon,
And
Accaron
and Gaza's frontier bounds.
See also
References
- Joseph Fontenrose, "Dagon and El" Oriens
10.2 (December 1957), pp. 277-279.
- Called Demarus in the report.
- Fontenrose 1957:277.
- R.A. Stewart Macalister, The Philistines (London)
1914, p. 112 (illus.).
- Noticed by Schmökel 1928, noted in Fontenrose 1957:278.
- H. Schmökel, Der Gott Dagan (Borna-Leipzig) 1928.
- Fontenrose 1957:278, who suggests that Berossos' Odakon, part man and part
fish, who rose from the Erythraean Sea, was possibly a garbled version of
Dagon.
Notes
- ANET = Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 3rd ed.
with Supplement (1969). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN
0-691-03503-2.
- Dagon in Etana: Encyclopædia Biblica Volume I A–D:
Dabarah - David (PDF).
- Feliu, Lluis (2003). The God Dagan in Bronze Age
Syria, trans. Wilfred G. E. Watson. Leiden: Brill Academic
Publishers. ISBN 90-04-13158-2
- Fleming, D. (1993). "Baal and Dagan in Ancient Syria",
Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und Vorderasiatische
Archäologie 83, pp. 88–98.
- Matthiae, Paolo (1977). Ebla: An Empire Rediscovered.
London: Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-22974-8.
- Pettinato, Giovanni (1981). The Archives of Ebla. New
York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-13152-6
Some parts of the above are derived from the 1911
Encyclopædia
Britannica.
External links