BOOK IV. OF THE WATERS. HEAD II. OF DAGON.

○It were premature, in the present stage of the inquiry, to do more than indicate, with such brevity as the subject admits, the point at which the received opinion respecting Dagon, the deity of the Philistines (1 Sam. v. 2–5), must be judged not so much erroneous as incomplete. That opinion, which derives the name from the Hebrew dag (a fish), and which has been adopted, not without some appearance of reason, by the generality of commentators, is opposed by the testimony of Philo Byblius, who, as cited by Eusebius (Euseb. Praep. Evang. i. 10), makes Dagon the inventor of corn and of the plough, and accordingly connects the name with dagan (corn). Between these opinions it has been usual to choose. I shall endeavour to show, in its proper place, that no choice is required; that the fish and the grain are not two notions but one, namely, the vessel and the seed which it preserved; and that the error of both parties lies, as is not infrequently the case, less in what they affirm than in what they have omitted to consider. The objections which may be urged against this view, and which I do not affect to underrate, will be considered under the next head.¹ NB-03-014 NB-36-004

×It will be convenient, before the opinions are examined, to set down what the sacred text itself affirms, and to distinguish it, with a care which has not always been observed, from what has been added to it by interpreters. The text relates that the Philistines, having taken the ark of God, brought it into the house of Dagon and set it by Dagon; that on the morrow the idol was found fallen upon his face before the ark, and was set again in his place; and that on the following morning it was found fallen a second time, with the head and both the palms of the hands cut off upon the threshold, so that "only the stump of Dagon was left to him."² In another place the same deity appears as the god of the lords of the Philistines, to whom they gathered together to offer a great sacrifice, and in whose honour they rejoiced over the captivity of Samson; but of his figure nothing is there said.³ More than this the sacred text does not affirm; and it is to be observed that it nowhere affirms, in so many words, that the remainder which was left was the form of a fish, nor that the name was derived from that form, nor indeed that the name was derived from anything at all. NB-03-014 NB-04-010

○The opinion which derives the name from the fish rests, so far as I have been able to ascertain, upon the interpretation which the Rabbins have given of the remainder, and upon the authority of Selden, who, following them, understands that which was left to have been the form of a fish, and who has been followed, in his turn, by the generality of those who have since written upon the subject.⁴ To this opinion Mr. Bryant has given a form of his own, by dividing the name into two parts, of which the first is the fish and the second the title of the deity: "Dagon is a compound, which is made up of Dag-On; and denotes the God On in the semblance of Dag, a fish"; and he adds, upon what authority he does not in that place declare, that the chief deity of Gath and of Ascalon, and of many cities in Syria, "was worshiped under this form; having the upper parts of a man, but below the figure of a fish."⁵ I do not at present inquire whether the division of the name can be sustained; I observe only that it presupposes the derivation which it was intended to confirm, and that the figure which it describes is not that which the sacred text describes, but that which the interpreters have supplied. NB-03-014 NB-39-011

○The opinion which derives the name from corn rests upon a single testimony, but upon a testimony which, as it professes to give the account of the Phenicians themselves, is entitled to a consideration which has seldom been accorded to it. Philo Byblius, in the fragment of Sanchoniatho which Eusebius has preserved, makes Dagon one of the sons of Heaven and of Earth, relates that he discovered corn and the plough, and that he was on that account called Zeus Arotrios, and renders his name by Siton, that is, the god of corn; whence it is evident that the Phenicians, or at least those who professed to deliver their theology, referred the name, not to the fish, but to dagan (corn).⁶ Selden, who was not ignorant of this testimony, disposes of it by pronouncing that Philo blundered, hallucinatus est (he blundered), in deriving the name from corn when he ought to have derived it from the fish; and the judgment, delivered by so great an authority, has for the most part been allowed to stand without examination.⁷ NB-36-004 NB-42-009

○It is not without reluctance that I find myself obliged to question the consistency of a writer to whom every inquirer into the religions of Syria is so largely indebted; but it is necessary to observe that Selden, in the same chapter in which he charges Philo with error respecting Dagon, appeals to the same Philo against those who had proposed other derivations of the Syrian goddess, and rejects those derivations, which he reports from certain Greek writers, as at once laughable and contrary to Philo of Byblos.⁸ He thus employs the authority of Philo in the one case and sets it aside in the other, without having anywhere, so far as I have observed, distinguished the matters in which that writer is to be trusted from those in which he is to be blamed; and until that distinction is made, it cannot be said that the preference which Selden has given to the fish over the corn rests upon anything more than his preference. NB-42-009

○Between these two opinions Mr. Faber alone, so far as I have observed, has declined to choose; and since his manner of declining approaches more nearly than any other to the view which I propose, and is nevertheless, as I shall show, inconsistent with it, it is necessary to state it with some exactness. "The account, which Sanchoniatho gives of Dagon," he says, "exactly agrees with the historical character of Noah"; the invention of bread and of the plough he refers to the patriarch as a husbandman, and the figure of the fish to the same patriarch as preserved through the waters; and he concludes that Dagon was one of the many deities in whom "the great diluvian and agricultural patriarch" was adored by his posterity.⁹ Mr. Faber, therefore, unites the fish and the grain, and unites them in the Deluge; and so far I have the satisfaction of agreeing with him. But he unites them in the person of the patriarch, and not in the event; and in so doing he confounds two modes of corruption which it is the business of the present inquiry to keep distinct, namely, the deifying of the patriarchs and the remembrance of the Deluge in the gods of the waters, and ascribes to the man what belongs to the vessel. That the confusion is not a matter of words merely, will appear when it is observed that upon Mr. Faber's principle every deity who is connected with the waters must be the patriarch, and every deity who is the patriarch must be connected with the waters; so that the two modes, being once confounded, can never again be separated, and the distinction upon which the whole classification of the heathen fables depends is lost.¹⁰ NB-36-004 NB-22-009

○Mr. Bryant, who likewise brings the fish and the grain together, explains their meeting in a manner which it is necessary to notice, if only that it may be set aside. Having made Dagon the god On in the semblance of a fish, and On being, as he says, the Egyptian title of Osiris, he observes that the inventions which are ascribed to Dagon, namely the plough and bread corn, are ascribed also to Zeuth and to Osiris, and pronounces them to be all the same deity.¹¹ But Philo, upon whose testimony the ascription of these inventions to Dagon entirely rests, gives Dagon the name of Zeus Arotrios; and if a common invention suffices to make Dagon the same with Osiris, it suffices with equal right to make him the same with Jupiter, and Jupiter and Osiris are then one: which is to suppose beforehand what the argument is designed to prove, and to make the sameness of the gods the explanation of the very coincidence from which their sameness was to be inferred. NB-39-011

○It will be perceived that the view which I propose differs from each of these in a single point, and that the point is in each case the same. Selden chooses the fish and sets aside the corn; Philo, or the Phenicians whose account he delivers, retain the corn and say nothing of the fish; Mr. Faber retains both, and refers both to the patriarch; Mr. Bryant retains both, and refers both to the sameness of a god. I retain both, and refer both to the event: the fish being, as I conceive, the vessel in which the remnant of mankind was preserved through the waters, and the corn the seed which it preserved; so that the deity in whom the two are united is neither a fish-god who was afterwards credited with agriculture, nor a husbandman who was afterwards figured as a fish, but the memorial, under a figure, of the Deluge itself and of the renewal of the world which followed it.¹² If this can be established, no choice is required between the derivations, which are then found to be two names of one thing; and neither Selden nor Philo is in error, except by omission. The proof of it, which requires the collection of the testimonies in which the fish and the grain are found together among peoples other than the Phenicians, and which therefore belongs rather to the heads of Oannes and of Atargatis than to this, will be found in its place; and I shall here content myself with indicating the objections which may be urged against it. NB-36-004 NB-03-014

○It may be objected, in the first place, that the two derivations cannot both be true, since a name can have but one origin; to which I answer, that the objection supposes the name to have been formed by a single act of derivation from a single word, whereas it is not improbable that the name was given to a thing which was signified by both words, and that the resemblance of the words, so far from being the cause of the confusion, was the occasion upon which the two significations of the thing came to be united in a single name. It may be objected, in the second place, that the testimony of Philo is late, and that his fragment has passed through more hands than one; to which I answer, that I do not rest upon it more than it will bear, and that the lateness of a testimony, while it diminishes its authority as to the form in which a tradition is delivered, does not diminish, and in some cases increases, its value as evidence that the tradition was still remembered. It may be objected, in the third place, that the sacred text nowhere describes the idol as a fish, and that the view which I propose therefore rests, in part at least, upon the interpretation of the Rabbins which I have myself declined to receive; to which I answer, that the view does not depend upon the figure of the idol at Ashdod, but upon the conjunction of the fish and the grain in the testimony of more than one people, and that it would remain, if the Rabbins were wholly mistaken, exactly where it stands. And it may be objected, lastly, that the view of Mr. Faber explains the same facts with equal facility, and with fewer suppositions; to which I answer, that it explains them with equal facility precisely because it confounds what ought to be distinguished, and that an explanation which can account equally for every instance is not on that account the more to be received. These objections, and others which may be urged with less force, will be considered at greater length under the next head.¹³ NB-03-014 NB-04-010 NB-36-004 NB-42-009