(February 9, 2013 at 10:43 pm)Minimalist Wrote: What's amusing about this is that "Dagon" was a Sumerian diety from the mid 3'd millenium. He may have been booted around for a while in the ANE but the Philistines did not arrive in Canaan until the mid-12th century BCE. Dagon would have been somewhat long in the tooth by then.
It is doubtful that the Philistines, who were Hellenic, would have known about Dagon prior to landing so we are asked to believe that they made landfall and went "native." Seems unconvincing but then so much of the OT is nothing but horseshit.
Dagon was a major god in what is now the Levant being mentioned in various texts from 2500 BCE onwards. The Syrians, Phoenicians and Canaanites all worshipped Dagon. In the Cannanite religion Dagon was the god of grain.
Since the Philistines had been long been assimilated into local Canaanite population by the time the Old Testament was written. The people of the old Philistine city states could have had Dagon as their chief god, like the people in Judea had Yahweh as their chief god and so forth. I would not be surprised if the people in Judea worshipped Dagon as one of their gods, Baal and Asherah certain were.
So it would not be surprising in my opinion if the Old Testament writers, the Priestly "reformers" decided to smear as foreign or alien gods such as Baal, Asherah, Chemosh, Moloch and Dagon in order to get people to convert to the Yahweh cult. Although the Priestly reformers merged El the chief god in the Canannite pantheon with Yahweh for some reason.
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