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The Bel of the Assyrians was certainly not their Fish-god; nor had his epithet Da-gaga any real connection with the word dag, "a fish." To speak of "Bel-Dagon" is thus to mislead the ordinary reader, who naturally supposes from the term that he is to identify the great god Belus, the second deity of the first Triad, with the fish forms upon the sculptures. HEA, or HOA.
The Phoenicians made him the god of corn in consequence of the resemblance of his name to the word which signifies "corn"; primarily, however, he would have been a god of the earth. The idea that he was a fish-god is of post-Biblical date, and due to a false etymology, which derived his name from the Hebrew dag, "a fish."
We may perhaps gather the fact from Berosus' account of the Fish-God as an early object of veneration in that region, as well as from the Hamitic etymology of the name by which he was ordinarily known even in Assyria. There he was always one of the most important deities. It has been already mentioned that Nin was the son of Bel-Nimrod, and that Beltis was both his wife and his mother.
"It is the fish-god, Apukohai, who drags his canoe," declared the rowers, as he passed. In twenty-four hours he was at the side of Kooipo with the whale-tooth, proof of his voyage, that was delivered to him at Kaula by a servant who had been sent there with it in advance. He was easily the victor, the other contestants arriving from one to three days later.
Perhaps he was praying in the temple for the return of the Ark of the Covenant. Wherever the Ark went among the Philistines, there went also trouble and death. When they put it in the temple of their fish-god Dagon, the great idol fell down before it and was broken.
“And then what?” she would ask when the tale was done; and the woman would tell her of Ninus and Semiramis, of Sennachereb, of Sardanapalus, Belsarazzur, of Dagon, the fish-god of Philistia, by whom Goliath swore and in whose temple Samson died, or of Sargon, who, placed by his mother in an ark of rushes, was set adrift in the Euphrates, yet, happily discovered by a water-carrier, afterwards became a leader of men.
They caught a number of them, killed them in sacrifice to their offended fish-god, and ate them. The two parties then flew to arms and fought several battles; they sacked one another's cities in turns, and the war was not stopped till the Roman troops marched to the spot and punished them both.
Chaldean cosmogony relates that Oannes, the Fish-god, devoted 259,200 years to the education of mankind, then came a period of 432,000 years taken up with the reigns of mythical personages, and at the end of these 691,000 years, the deluge renewed the face of the earth. But the Hindoos have done better than all that.
The heroic legends and romances are the most interesting and the best-known portions of the newly-recovered literature. We have already noticed some fragments of mythology, such as the story of the fish-god who comes up daily from the sea, the moon being the father of the sun, and the family history of Ea and Davkina, with the sun their child.
Dagon seems to have been a fish-god with human head and hands; his worshippers wore fish-skins. In the temples of Apollo and Aphrodite were sacred fish, which may point to a fish cult. Atargatis is said to have had sacred fish at Askelon, and from Xenophon we read that the fish of the Chalus were regarded as gods. Goat.
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