When the Philistines took the ark of God, they brought it into the house of Dagon, and set it by Dagon.
The house of Dagon. Stately temples were erected in honour of this idol, who was the principal deity of the Philistines, but whose worship extended over all Syria, as well as Mesopotamia and Chaldea, his name being found among the Assyrian gods on the cuneiform inscriptions (Rawlinson). He was represented under a monstrous combination of a human head, breast, and arms, joined to the belly and tail of a fish. The captured ark was placed in the temple of Dagon, right before this image of the idol. "Dagon" х Daagown (H1712), from daag (H1709), a fish, and -own, the abbreviated form of the name of the god] - the maritime, Aon, or Oannes, as he was called in Chaldean. 'There is in the British museum an ancient coin which represents Dagon on one side, and a ship on the other. The god has a human head and arms, and the tail of a dolphin. In his right hand he holds a fish, with its head upwards; in his left another, with its head downward.
This ingenious hieroglyphic signifies that in the land over which Aon, the enlightener of men, ruled and guided the sun, it began its course on land in the east (the front), figured by the human forepart, and ended it in the sea in the west (the back), figured by the hind part of a maritime creature. It reaches its greatest elevation at the right hand of the god - i:e., the south; this is implied by the fish looking upward: and it sank below the horizon at his left, the north; this is expressed by the fish going down. Such an emblem must have been designed in a country of which it accurately described the geographical bearings-one with the continent eastward, and a western sea; and, moreover, for the emblem to be intelligible, it requires that the Oriental mode of reckoning, and which refers the east to the front, the west to the back, etc., should be customary in the language of the country. These conditions are fulfilled in Palestine alone, in the region of the maritime proto-Phoenicians, where we find the Scriptural Philistines, worshippers of Dagon' (Corbaux, 'Journal of Sacred Literature,' Oct., 1852, p. 114).
Bunsen ('Egypt's Place,' 4:, p. 244) gives a totally different view of the Philistine deity. According to him, 'Dagon = Dagan, grain; and the Shephelah, the plain of Philistia, was preeminently a wheat-field. Dagon, then, is both linguistically and documentally the god or Zeus of agriculture.' But this view of Bunsen's is, like many other of his opinions, paradoxical, and contradicted by history and modern discoveries.
The form in which, according to the united testimony of ancient Jewish and pagan writers, the Dagon of Phoenicia and the Philistines was worshipped was a combination of the human figure with that of a fish (Selden, 'De Diis Syris;' Kenrick's 'Phoenicia;' Beyer's and Abarbanel's 'Commentaries'). The ancient historian Berosus describes ten reigns, filled with accounts of monsters, half men, half fish, who passed the night in the sea and the daytime on land, prototypes of Dagon (Cory's 'Fragments,' p. 30). A sculptured figure of Dagon, the fish god, was found in the palace of Kouyunjik, dressed in Assyrian costume (see plate, Layard's 'Nineveh and Babylon,' p. 343), it having been introduced into Chaldea, Assyria, and Babylon by the Phoenician merchants; and his name, as Rawlinson states, is frequently met with in the cuneiform inscriptions.
Set it by Dagon, х 'eetsel (H681)] - by the side of, near Dagon; deposited in his temple as a prize of war.