דָּגוֹן
Dagon
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Dagon’ fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H1712 appears — 7 distinct verses across 3 books. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Hebrew form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Hebrew Bible; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences are not indexed here.
Judges 1 verse
1 Samuel 5 verses
- 1 Samuel 5:2 דָּג֑וֹן דָּגֽוֹן n Proper n Proper The Philistines took the ark of God, and brought it into the house of Dagon, and set it by Dagon.
- 1 Samuel 5:3 דָג֗וֹן דָּג֔וֹן n Proper n Proper When they of Ashdod arose early on the next day, behold, Dagon was fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of Yahweh. They took Dagon, and set him in his place again.
- 1 Samuel 5:4 דָג֗וֹן דָּג֜וֹן דָּג֖וֹן n Proper n Proper n Proper When they arose early on the next day morning, behold, Dagon was fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of Yahweh; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands [lay] cut off on the threshold; only [the stump of] Dagon was left to him.
- 1 Samuel 5:5 דָג֜וֹן דָּג֛וֹן דָּג֖וֹן n Proper n Proper n Proper Therefore neither the priests of Dagon, nor any who come into Dagon's house, tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod, to this day.
- 1 Samuel 5:7 דָּג֥וֹן n Proper When the men of Ashdod saw that it was so, they said, The ark of the God of Israel shall not abide with us; for his hand is sore on us, and on Dagon our god.
1 Chronicles 1 verse
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
דגון — transliterated Dâgôwn — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Dagon.” Its uses cluster heavily in 1 Samuel (71% of all occurrences). With 7 verses in 3 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. Debuting at Judges 16:23, it then recurs through the corpus. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1712 catalogs a Hebrew word from the Hebrew Old Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Hebrew Old Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,001
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,001 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Samuel 5 verses 71%
- Judges 1 verse 14%
- 1 Chronicles 1 verse 14%
By section of the Old Testament
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Each share is this word’s portion of its verses in that division of the Hebrew canon. Each figure is a share of the word’s 7 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 6 verses · 86%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 14%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: Dagon 9×, Behold dagon 2×
- American Standard Version: Dagon 9×, Behold 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Dagon 7×, Was dagon 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Dagon 13×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1712 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1712 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1712 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 4 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1712 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses BDB distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- Dagon = "a fish"
- a Philistine deity of fertility; represented with the face and hands of a man and the tail of a fish
Word origin
n.pr.m. 1 S 5:4 god & idol of Philistines (cf. Assyrian Dagan, Dakan, name perhaps non-Shemitic COT Ju 16:23 DlPa 139 SayceRel. Bab. 188 f. but v. Jen infr.)—god of Ashdod, except Ju 16:23 (Gaza) & 1 Ch 10:10 (but cf. infr.);—דגון אֱלֹהֵיהֶם Ju 16:23 cf. דגון אֱלֹהֵינוּ 1 S 5:7, בֵּית ד׳ 1 S 5:2, 5 1 Ch 10:10 (here hardly orig. cf. ‖ 1 S 31:10 & We Dr); כֹּהֲנֵי ד׳ 1 S 5:5, מִפְתַּן ד׳ v 5; as name of image ד׳ (אֵצֶל) v 2, 3, 4, דגון נֹפֵל v 3, 4, רַק ד׳ נִשְׁאַר עָלָיו v 4 (but sense difficult; We proposes דָּגוֹ only his fish, i.e. fishy part, was left upon him, v. also Dr;—but was Dagon a fish-god? Cf. works cited above & Scholz Götzendienst 238 ff., Baud in PRE2 iii. 460 ff., especially JenKosmol. 449 ff.). Vid. בֵּית דָּגוֹן p. 111.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from דג (dâg) (H1709) — fish.
Jastrow Dictionary
A second Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon for comparison, covering Aramaic and post-biblical (Talmudic, Targumic, Midrashic) usage that the biblical-Hebrew BDB does not. Matched by lemma rather than by Strong’s number, so a lemma may carry more than one Jastrow headword (shown separately below), and the entries cover usage well beyond the Bible.
דָּגוֹן
- (b. h.) pr. n. Dagon, name of the Philistean god. Tosef. Sabb. VII (VIII), 2 דגן על שם ע"ז וכ׳ Dagan (in the charm Dagan v’Kidron) reminds of idolatry, as it is said &c. (Jud. XVI, 23). Y. ib. VI, 8ᶜ bot. [read:] ד׳ משום ע"ז. e.g. Judges 16:23
A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Marcus Jastrow; London, Luzac, 1903) — Public Domain. Digitized via Sefaria. Digitized via Sefaria. Full attribution on Sources.
Forms in the corpus
The 10 distinct written forms H1712 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that state’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| דָג֗וֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 5:3 | 2 |
| דָּג֖וֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 5:4 | 2 |
| דָּגֽוֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Chronicles 10:10 | 2 |
| דָג֜וֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 5:5 | 1 |
| דָּג֑וֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 5:2 | 1 |
| דָּג֔וֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 5:3 | 1 |
| דָּג֛וֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 5:5 | 1 |
| דָּג֜וֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 5:4 | 1 |
| דָּג֥וֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 5:7 | 1 |
| לְ/דָג֥וֹן | Noun, Proper | Judges 16:23 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1712, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.
Derives from
Shares the same root
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Dagon). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Little fish; diminutive from dag = a fish, the fish-god; the national god of the Philistines (Judg. 16:23). This idol had the body of a fish with the head and hands of a man. It was an Assyrio-Babylonian deity, the worship of which was introduced among the Philistines through Chaldea. The most famous of the temples of Dagon were at Gaza (Judg. 16:23-30) and Ashdod (1 Sam. 5:1-7). (See FISH.)
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(a fish), apparently the masculine, (1 Samuel 5:3,4) correlative of Atargatis, was the national god of the Philistines. The most famous temples of Dagon were at Gaza, (Judges 16:21-30) and Ashdod. (1 Samuel 5:5,6; 1 Chronicles 10:10) The latter temple was destroyed by Jonathan in the Maccabaean wars. Traces of the worship of Dagon likewise appear in the names Caphar-dagon (near Jamnia) and Beth-dagon in Judah, (Joshua 15:41) and Asher. (Joshua 19:27) Dagon was represented with the face and hands of a man and the tail of a fish. (1 Samuel 5:5) The fish-like form was a natural emblem of fruitfulness, and as such was likely to be adopted by seafaring tribes in the representation of their gods.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
corn; a fish
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 Hebrew verses it occurs in. You can read those verses in Greek by switching the Old Testament edition to the Septuagint.
Read these verses in the Septuagint
This is a verse-level parallel only — the same verses exist in both the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments. No word-level Hebrew↔Greek correspondence is claimed: the data carries no such alignment, so no Greek word is shown as this Hebrew word’s translation. Coverage is not total — the Septuagint omits the deuterocanon and renumbers the Psalms, so some Hebrew verses have no direct Greek parallel.
