Dagon but Not Forgotten

Samson et Dalila can be understood as a story about desire, strength, and the struggle for freedom from oppression. It is also a story about religious conflict between two warring peoples: the Israelites, led by Samson, and the Philistines, led by the High Priest of Dagon, Dalila, and Abimélech, among others. The Israelites worship Yahweh or Jehovah, the God of the Bible, whereas the Philistines worship Dagon, whose temple Samson ultimately topples at the conclusion of the opera.

Dagon (pronounced DAY-gahn), sometimes written as Dagan, was a deity among Semitic groups of the ancient Near East—including those in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Canaan. Dagon is variously described as a god of grain, vegetation, or crops. His name derives from dgn in Ugaritic (an extinct Semitic language from the coastal city of Ugarit) and dagan in Hebrew, both meaning “grain.” He was also known as the inventor of the plow and a fertility god. Dagon is even mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi, the ancient Babylonian legal text dated c. 1750 B.C.E. Biblical evidence, which is largely not supported by archaeological data, suggests that there were temples to Dagon in Gaza, Ashdod, Beth-Dagon (all in modern-day Israel and Palestine), and Ugarit (in modern-day Syria).

This association between Dagon and grain adds to the significance of individual scenes in Samson et Dalila. In Act I, after Samson slays Abimélech, the High Priest of Dagon learns from a group of Philistine soldiers that, “Samson’s angry mob is destroying our harvest.” Immediately upon gaining their liberation, however temporary, the Israelites target the domain of Dagon himself: the Philistines’ crops. In Act III, meanwhile, after Samson has been captured and blinded, he is forced to push a grist mill, grinding grain into flour. Once subjugated again by the Philistines, the Israelite hero must suffer by performing backbreaking labor in service to Dagon.

In the centuries after Dagon reigned in the ancient Near East, from approximately 3000–1000 B.C.E., the deity took on different—and sometimes strange—forms. A Jewish Bible commentator in the 13th century errantly claimed that Dagon was half-man, half-fish, an apparent misreading of the fact that the Hebrew dag means “fish.” In his biblical epic Paradise Lost (1667), English poet John Milton describes Dagon as a “Sea Monster, upward Man / And downward Fish.” His later Samson Agonistes (1671), a retelling of the Samson legend ultimately adapted as an oratorio by George Frideric Handel in 1741, calls Dagon the Philistines’ “Sea-Idol.”

This mythology lingered well into the 19th century, when British novelist George Eliot included in her Middlemarch (1871) that the pedantic scholar Mr. Casaubon had arrived at “an entirely new view of the Philistine god Dagon and other fish-deities.” More recently, H. P. Lovecraft, the popular American author of horror and science fiction, published a short story called “Dagon” (1919), about a gigantic sea monster that haunts a shipwrecked sailor— an association that has led to a surprising proliferation of video games, graphic novels, and internet memes featuring the figure first attested more than 5,000 years ago.