Dagan

Summary

Dagan is a great god of the upper Euphrates in Syria. His earliest records are in the Ebla tablets of the twenty-fourth century BCE, his greatest house was at Tuttul on the Euphrates, and after it Mari and Terqa. In that country he was "father of the gods" and "lord of the land"; on the tablets of Ugarit Baal is called "son of Dagan"; and in the Bible he appears as Dagon, god of the Philistines at Ashdod and Gaza.

No long myth of his survives; his story lies in the records that mention him. Sargon of Akkad says he bowed to Dagan at Tuttul, and Dagan gave him "the upper land": Mari, Yarmuti and Ebla as far as the Cedar Forest and the Silver Mountains. At Mari in the eighteenth century BCE prophets received his messages in his temple and sent them on to the king; King Zimri-Lim gave him a throne, the king was told to kiss his foot, and his statue travelled by boat from city to city. Healey, p. 216, Otto, pp. 1–3. At Ugarit Dagan does nothing in the stories, but his name stays with his son: Yamm's envoys ask the council of El to hand over "Baal, the son of Dagan, whose gold I shall seize". Dagan stands in the god lists after El and before Baal, and two standing stones found at one of the two acropolis temples record offerings to him.

A late account explains the title. Philo of Byblos, a writer of the first or second century CE, says that Uranus, Heaven, married his sister Ge, Earth, and she bore him four sons: Elus, who is Kronos, Baetylus, Dagon "who is Siton", that is Grain, and Atlas. When Kronos made war on his father and defeated him, Uranus's concubine was captured, already pregnant; Kronos gave her in marriage to Dagon, and in his house she bore Uranus's child and named him Demarus. Scholars compare the name Demarus with a title of Baal; if he is Baal, then in this account Baal is a son of Dagan's house, not of his body. Philo adds that Dagon discovered grain and the plough and was called "Zeus of the Plough".

In the Bible Dagan became Dagon, god of the Philistines at Ashdod. The Philistines carry the captured Ark of the Covenant into the house of Dagon and set it beside him. In the morning they find Dagon fallen on his face before the Ark and put him back in his place. The next morning he has fallen again, his head and both hands cut off on the threshold, only his trunk left, "therefore neither the priests of Dagon, nor any that come into Dagon's house, tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod". The Philistine lords gather to offer Dagon a great sacrifice because he delivered Samson into their hands; they fasten Saul's head in his house; and in the second century BCE Jonathan the Maccabee burns his temple at Azotus, that is Ashdod.

The idea Dagan's records turn on is the father who sits down and leaves the work to his son. In the third millennium BCE he was shown standing with his weapon, granting lands to kings; in the second he was shown as a bearded elder on his throne, approached on cylinder seals by the storm god and the sun god. The action passed to Baal, and Dagan kept the father's place, as El kept it at Ugarit. His tie to the land is the tie of a father to what he owns: "lord of the land" on the Euphrates, his name the coastal word for grain, and his son the bringer of the rain that waters the grain.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. The people of the Euphrates wrote it in cuneiform Da-ga-an, Ugarit wrote it with the consonants dgn, and Hebrew turned its long a into o, Dāgôn. The g of these languages answers Arabic j, so the name belongs to the root d-j-n. Lane gives dajn as the clouds' covering the sky, and also abundant rain; a saḥāba dājina is a cloud that rains continually; and Ibn al-Aʿrābī gives dagana, with gh, in the same sense, the form the essay cites. The same letters in Hebrew, dāgān, are grain and corn, and the inscription of Eshmunazar, king of Sidon, calls the plains of Sharon "lands of grain" with this word. So the root in the two branches holds the raining cloud and the grain that grows beneath it, which is what the Canaanite essay joins when it begins with grain and wheat and then makes Dagan "god of the cloud and the rain that makes the grain grow". It is what the records make him: father of the rain-bringer, "Siton" in Philo, and the one who taught people to plough.

Linguistic Root

Dagan and dajn

The comparison drops no letter. d is d; Arabic j answers the g of Akkadian, Ugaritic and Hebrew, as in jamal and gāmāl, "camel"; n is n. The o of Hebrew Dāgôn comes from a Canaanite shift that turns long a into o, so it is not a root letter. Lane gives the root two senses. The first is cloud and rain: dajn is the clouds' covering the sky and abundant rain, and dujunna is cloud covering the whole sky, full of moisture and dark but not yet raining, and also darkness itself. The second is staying: dajana bi-l-makān is to remain in a place and keep to it, whence dawājin, the sheep, pigeons and other animals that keep to the houses. The shared sense is a cloud that stays over the land and rains on it, and a house where people and their animals stay.

The limit of the reading is historical. Healey writes that the name's origin is unknown, that the grain sense of dgn is West Semitic and unknown in Mesopotamia, so Dagan's worshippers at Mari did not hear grain in it, that some scholars think the grain word was taken from the god's name, and that the Arabic comparison is remote. The name is attested at Ebla a thousand years before any grain word with its letters. The reading joins a sure Arabic word and a sure Canaanite word; what the name meant at Ebla and Mari remains to be learned.

Other readings in the essay

The Canaanite essay first gives Dagon as "grain, wheat" and then puts dajana, to grow dark and cloudy, first in its table; together they are the reading we began with. It lists a third, middling one: dā and ghān, giving and strength, from a mix of Semitic and Akkadian sources, which splits a single root into two words with no evidence that the name is a compound. The essay reads dujunna, darkness, as an image of the dark ground from which grain grows, from the same root. Reading the name from Hebrew dāg, fish, is old, found in Jerome and some Jewish commentators, and Wellhausen built on it an emendation of 1 Samuel 5:4 that leaves Dagon "his fish part"; scholars have dropped it because the ancient versions understood the word as trunk or body.

Key Mythic Narratives

The great mountain and the weapon of Dagan

A bilingual letter from Mari calls Dagan "the great mountain, father of the great gods", and at Emar his name is written with the sign for mountain. From Sargon's time onward texts speak of "the weapon of Dagan" that helps kings against their enemies, and Yahdun-Lim of Mari says he took the banks of the Euphrates by Dagan's mighty weapon. Dagan had standing stones at Tuttul and Mari, and at Emar his statue was carried in procession from the temple to stones outside the city. His consort is Shala, named with him from the Ebla tablets on.

Dagan on the Ugarit tablets outside the Baal Cycle

In the wedding of Yarikh the moon, KTU 1.24, "Dagan of Tuttul" appears in a broken line, and some scholars take him there as Yarikh's father. In the snakebite spell KTU 1.100 a mare whose foal has been bitten calls on her mother Shapsh to carry her voice to the gods one after another, each in his own city: El at the source of the rivers, Baal on Saphon, Dagan in Tuttul, Yarikh in Larugat, Shahar and Shalim in heaven, and only the last, Horon, answers. So at Ugarit Dagan still lives in distant Tuttul. The two standing stones record an offering called pgr, a name taken from the word for a corpse, which at Mari was offered to Dagan and which some scholars tie to the cult of the dead.

Kings who bore his name

Kings of Isin in southern Mesopotamia bore his name: Iddin-Dagan, "Dagan has given", and Ishme-Dagan. Iddin-Dagan's hymn to Inanna is the oldest complete telling of the sacred marriage: on the bed Inanna says to the king, "Iddin-Dagan, you are indeed my beloved". In the south scribes sometimes equated Dagan with Enlil. Inanna and Iddin-Dagan, 169–216, Healey, p. 216.

Symbolic Reading

The Canaanite essay reads Dagan as a god of grain and farming and protector of the harvest, and sees in dujunna an image of the hidden ground beneath the surface from which grain comes out of darkness, setting him beside the words "He gives life to the earth after its death". The Roman structural essay makes him the third of an eastern three: El for sovereignty, Baal for force, and Dagon or Ishtar for the people and fertility.

In the evidence Dagan is a father of the land more than its farmer. The king kisses his foot and receives the land from him, and at his stones offerings are made that some scholars tie to the cult of the dead, so he is the owner of the land who grants it and receives those who lived on it. The grain in his name makes father, land and food one thing, while the rain comes from his son Baal. The story of Ashdod reads the fallen statue: the Philistines brought the Ark into their god's house as a sign of his victory, and their god fell before it, first bowing and then broken.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Dagan stands on the Euphrates where El stands at Ugarit and Enlil in Mesopotamia: a father of the gods seated on his throne, approached by his son the storm god, and in the south he was at times equated with Enlil outright. Cylinder seals show this council: Dagan seated, the storm god and the sun god standing before him. In Philo, Dagon is the brother of Kronos, son of Uranus, and so enters the line of succession told in the Greek Theogony.

The Canaanite essay compares him with Greek Demeter and Roman Ceres, goddesses of grain, and links him with Osiris and Ninurta. Philo's Dagon and Demeter share the gift of grain to people; they part in that Demeter holds the seed in the ground when she loses her daughter, while Dagan in his records neither rages nor withholds anything. In Philo he discovers grain and the plough, which makes him one of the culture heroes who taught people a craft of living.