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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Dagon
The god of the Philistines, whose statue falls and breaks in front of Israel's ark.
Judges 16:23, in every translation this tool compares.
The Philistine god whose statue falls on its face in front of Israel's captured ark, twice, losing its head and hands on the threshold the second time. It reads like slapstick. It can also be read as a legal picture: the beaten vassal face down in front of his overlord.
The god of the Philistines, whose statue falls twice before the ark and loses its head and hands on the threshold. The narrative is a legal scene, the vassal prostrate before his suzerain, and slapstick is the wrong reading. Dagan (Dagon is the Philistine and Hebrew form) is one of the oldest attested Semitic gods, named in third-millennium texts from Ebla and Mari a thousand years before the Philistines existed as a people, so the Philistines adopted a god already ancient in the region they settled instead of bringing him from their Aegean background.
H1712, 13 occ
At Ugarit, Dagan is a minor presence in the myths and a major one in the cult. He is called father of Baal (bn dgn) even though Baal is also called El's son, a tension the sources never resolve, and one of Ugarit's two main temples was his, the other being Baal's. Ugaritic texts twice call him "Dagan of Tuttul," preserving his older cult center on the Euphrates.
The fish-god etymology comes from Jerome and medieval commentators reading dag, "fish." DDD is more cautious than the common claim that grain is more probable: it treats the fish and grain etymologies alike as unproven, since neither has solid support in the Hebrew Bible or in Mesopotamian and West Semitic sources, and it recommends resting on what is actually known, a major Amorite deity of the Mari region, instead of any etymology.
- Judges 16:23
- 1 Samuel 5:2-7
- 1 Chronicles 10:10
- DDD s.v. "Dagon," 216
