Judges 16:23

a great sacrifice unto Dagon at Gaza, as the context suggests (Judges 16:21). Dagon was the god specially honoured by the Philistines; he had a temple at Ashdod (1 Samuel 5:2-7Ma 10:83 f., Judges 11:4) and elsewhere; there was a Beth-dagon in the Shephçlah (Joshua 15:41? = Beit-dejan6 m. S.E. of Joppa, or Dejan1½ m. further south 1 [57]) and on the boundary of Asher (Joshua 19:27). But the name also occurs outside the territory once held by the Philistines; it survives in Beit-dejan7 m. E. of Nâblus; and we may infer that the worship of Dagon was not confined to the Philistines. Most likely he was a Canaanite god adopted by the Philistines when they settled in the country, just as they adopted Ashtoreth (1 Samuel 31:10). The name of the Canaanite letter-writer Dagan-takalain the Amarna tablets (Nos. 215, 216) carries us back to the age when Babylonian influences prevailed in Canaan; and Dagan is met with as the name of a deity from the early Babylonian down to the Assyrian period, both in proper names and in conjunction with Anu; the latter fact points to a god of heaven. But whether he was a native Babylonian god is not certain; it seems probable that he was introduced from outside, perhaps from Canaan; most authorities identify him with the Philistine Dagon 2 [58]. Of his nature nothing definite is known. Philo of Byblus derives the name from dâgân= corn, and regards him as an agricultural deity; Ḳimḥi (xiiith century a.d.) in his commentary on 1 Samuel 5:4 mentions a tradition that Dagon's image was shaped as a man above the waist and a fish below (dâg= fish). These, however, are only etymological guesses. It may be questioned whether the god, half man and half fish, represented on the coins of Ascalon and Arvad, was intended for Dagon 3 [59].

[57] One of these was probably the Bit-daganna mentioned in the Prism Inscr. of Sennacherib, KB.ii. 93.

[58] See Dhorme, La Rel. Assyro-Babylonienne(1910), 17, 35, 165; Zimmern, KAT.3, 358.

[59] As Lagrange considers, Ét. sur les Rel. Sémitiques2, 131 f.

for they said … our hand looks like a gloss founded on the song in the verse which follows.