Dagon meaning

Meaning

Fish-Guy, Oracle, Crystal Ball, Effortless Revealer Of Abundant Secrets

Etymology

From the noun דג (dag), fish, or דגן (dagan), grain, from the verb דגה (daga), to multiply or increase.

Related names

• Via דגן (dagan): Beth-dagon

The name Dagon appears in the Bible as belonging to the chief deity of the Philistines. When the Philistines finally caught Samson, they first imprisoned him in Gaza and then paraded him off in the temple of their god Dagon (Judges 16:23). Something similar was done to king Saul, or at least to his head (1 Chronicles 10:10).

Dagon and his temple (in Ashdod, this time) feature predominantly in the story of the abduction of the Ark of the Covenant (1 Samuel 4). Hophni and Phinehas had foolishly taken the Ark as a talisman into battle against the Philistines, but the Philistines prevailed and took the Ark for booty and placed it in the temple of Dagon in Ashdod (1 Samuel 5:2). The next morning, however, they found the statue of Dagon on its face in front of the Ark. They hoisted the statue back in place, but the morning after that they found the statue again on the floor, but this time the head and hands had broken off from the torso.

In the meantime, the Ashdodites came down with all sorts of horrible diseases and they decided to send the Ark first to Gath and then to Ekron, and everybody there too became sick. Finally, after seven months of this, the Philistines sent the Ark back to Israel, where it arrived in Beth-shemesh (1 Samuel 6:9).

It's worth noting that most of humanity's great diseases — so-called "zoonoses" such as tuberculosis, anthrax, measles, Ebola, leprosy, Lyme disease and even influenza — come from animals and didn't hit humanity until the agricultural revolution.

Dagon of the Philistines is often assumed to be a kind of fish-god, which was known with some degree of variation from Babylon to Egypt. This fish-god, with the body of a fish but human hands and head, appeared under different names (for instance Odakon), even to the extent that it becomes difficult to establish where one deity ends and the next one begins. Sometimes he is a fertility god, sometimes a storm god and sometimes a maritime god.

There was a fish-god named Dagan in Assyria and Babylon and scholars generally agree that this name came from a root dgn, meaning grain. But in his article on the Philistine Dagon in Hastings Dictionary of the Bible, N. Koenig states that "an identification of this god [Dagon] with the Babylonian Dagan is doubtful". In his book The Cosmology of the Babylonians, Peter Jensen even stated that the Assyrian deity Dagan had nothing to do with a fish-man named Odakon. The Jewish Encyclopedia, on the other hand, declares by no means certain that Dagon, Odakon and the Assyrian Dakan/Dagan were unrelated.

All these sources are somewhat archaic, and HAW Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament helpfully submits that "no modern scholar since the turn of the century [that's 1900] follows Jerome and Kimchi who suggested on the basis of popular etymologizing that he was a fish-god. Many moderns [...] view him as a grain god".

The obvious counter-argument is that when we moderns speaks of the Egyptian "sun god" or the Roman "war god", we don't mean to say that we think that the Egyptians called their solar deity Ra by the English word "sun" or the Romans referred to Mars by the English word "war". Entirely likewise, when Hebrew scribes living in Persia in the 7th century BC wrote about a Philistine deity of the 11th century BC named Dagon, they did not mean to imply that the Philistines back then called him Dagon, but that the Persian Hebrews of the 7th century did.

The 7th century Hebrew name for this 11th century Philistine deity clearly relates to the Hebrew word for fish, namely דג (dag). The -ון (-on) suffix is a very common way of individualizing a root. A great many nouns are formed this way, and subsequently many names are too. For instance, the familiar name Samson or שמשון (samson), meaning Sun Man, comes from the word שמש (shemesh), meaning sun. For more such names, see our long list of Biblical -on names.

We moderns may be tempted to write the whole ancient god business off as arcane and futile, but that's really not that clever and certainly not called for. Perhaps the personification of things like the sun or the phenomenon of war exceeds the compass of our enlightened sensibilities, but it serves no purpose to deny that the sun or the phenomenon of war actually exist, and played an extremely pivotal role in the lives of those who perhaps erroneously ascribed them breath and autonomous intellect. The identity of Dagon lies not with the Philistines but rather with the Hebrews. And to them, Dagon is what becomes personified when people worship whatever fish meant to Hebrews.

The obvious answer: to Hebrews, fish relate to prophecy the way birds relate to revelation (which is why angels are depicted with wings). We go into more detail in our article on the Greek word προφητης (prophetes), but in summary: in Hebrew, dry land relates to knowledge and certainty whereas water relates to uncertainty and potentiality — and questions: the Hebrew common particle of inquisition מי (may), looks like the singular version of the plural word מים (mayim), meaning water. Rain, likewise, relates to a parched land the way fresh insights relate to some unyielding orthodoxy: the word מורה (moreh) means both rain and teacher. When Jesus told his disciples that they would be fishers of men, he did not imply that the men were the fish but rather that the men where the sea in which one fishes for knowledge of the unknown.

Being able to reliably foretell the future has been a greatly desired skill since deep antiquity. And the world has achieved it only in recent times. An important element of the scientific method is precisely that: predictability. A theory is only as good as its ability to predict the outcome of an experiment, or even some naturally occurring situation. Science, essentially, is all about the power of prophesy. Science is the ability to predict what will happen in some given situation. But the accuracy of our understanding of that given situation depends on the quality of our information. The God of Israel has always been a God of Information (see our article on the name YHWH), the faithful devotion to whom has always resulted in an accurate understanding of future outcomes (Deuteronomy 18:20-22).

The name Dagon is the Hebrew way of saying Oracle or Answer Man. The name Dagon is the Hebrew way of talking about some deity of information other than YHWH, and one in which people invest specifically to enhance their intuition about the hidden things. Dagon is essentially a personified Crystal Ball: a device that promises a shortcut to priceless insights without having to bother with learning natural law and information technology (such as script) or even having to respect and study other people's books and stories in order to unearth their deeper motivations and subliminal beliefs.

In our article on the names Gog and Magog, we point to a specific parallel between the Hebrew Bible and recent history in which Dagon plays an important part.

For a meaning of the name Dagon, NOBSE Study Bible Name List reads Fish and Jones' Dictionary of Old Testament Proper Names proposes a rather elaborate Honored Fish. BDB Theological Dictionary does not offer an interpretation of this name.

The historical parts of the Bible aren't merely stories that sum up legendary facts, but much rather a commentary on how Israel's devotion to YHWH won from the competing religions. By the time the Hebrew Bible was written, Yahwism experienced competition mostly from religions based on celestial deities, and abundance was a proverbial quality of stars (Genesis 15:5). Star-gazing was done by people who lived in darkness (Isaiah 9:2), the people who received the Word of God through parables, whereas the people of Israel received the great light of the Word of God as clearly as light of day (Mark 4:11). This tension between metaphorical stars and sun is clearly expressed in the stories concerning Dagon. This deity called Fish-Guy was first destroyed by Samson, or Sun Guy, and secondly by the Ark, which returned to Israel via Beth-shemesh (which means House Of The Sun). In that sense, the name Dagon means Astrology, or even more general: Polytheism, which was defeated by the slow but sure progress in theological thought that resulted in the advance of monotheism.

By the time the Biblical Dagon stories received their final form, the Greeks were telling myths about the constellation Pisces (Fish; and the Philistines were most probable of Aegean descent). Their stories told of Aphrodite and Eros who escaped the hundred dragon-headed "father of all monsters" Typhon by jumping into the sea and transforming into the fish that are still visible in the night sky as the constellation Pisces. As noted by Joseph Campbell, the story of the final defeat of Typhon by Zeus finds it Biblical reflections in the story of YHWH defeating Leviathan (Job 41) and Rahab (Isaiah 51:9).

But remember that the victories of YHWH aren't the victories of man. Since revelation occurs gradually, human understanding evolves equally gradually from the darkness of ignorance (hence wars, sickness and poverty) to the light of understanding (hence peace, health and prosperity). The stories of Abraham leaving Ur of the Chaldeans and Israel leaving Egypt tell besides an obvious difference also of a shared origin. Immature understanding must always make way for a mature understanding, but as long as the immatures don't declare war on the matures, the matures will always respectfully remember their ancestry.

Note that the name Jesus is closely related to the name Joshua, and Joshua's father was named Nun, which also means fish and also comes from a root that reflects abundance.