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 in the Book of Judges — 1 distinct verse. 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
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.
