StrongerBible

dag

דָּג

HebrewH1709“fish”

Appears 19 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 9:2Num 11:221Ki 4:33(5:13)2Ch 33:14Neh 3:3Neh 12:39Neh 13:16Job 12:8Job 41:7(40:31)Psa 8:8(9)Ecc 9:12Ezk 38:20Hos 4:3Jon 1:17(2:1) (2×)Jon 2:10(11)Hab 1:14Zep 1:3Zep 1:10
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeDAHGnoun

What dag means

fish: the ordinary living creatures of sea, river, and lake, pictured as one broad class rather than named by kind

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

This is the everyday Hebrew word for a fish, and for fish as a whole. The Bible sorts living things into three broad realms, the creatures of the water, the birds of the sky, and the animals of the land, and this word names the first of those three. It covers any fish at all, from the catch in a net to the shoals that fill the sea.

Hebrew never names a single kind of fish. Where the Bible will name a particular bird or beast, fish stay one undivided mass, told apart only by a rule of thumb (fins and scales) rather than by species. That makes fish the picture of the far-off and the countless: creatures that live in a realm people barely enter, too many to number and beyond human reach.

The word travels through the whole story of Scripture doing steady work. Fish stand under human care in the creation blessing (Genesis 1:26, 28; Psalm 8:8). They multiply beyond counting, so much so that the image of teeming fish lies behind a blessing of many descendants. They die when the world is unmade in judgment: the fish of the Nile rot in the plague, and the prophets sweep fish away to show a ruin deeper than the Flood, which had spared them. They feed people (Numbers 11:5) yet are never offered in sacrifice, since they cannot be raised, owned, or brought to the altar alive. And they stand for helpless, leaderless crowds, caught in a net like people under a tyrant (Habakkuk 1:14; Ecclesiastes 9:12).

The word appears in two closely related forms. The plain form names a fish or fish in general; a paired form, feminine in shape, tends to mean fish gathered as a group, a catch, or a whole supply. The book of Jonah slides between the two forms for the very same great fish within three verses, which has drawn centuries of comment.

Gen 1:26Gen 1:28Gen 9:2Exo 7:18Exo 7:21Num 11:5Num 11:22Deu 4:181Ki 4:33(5:13)2Ch 33:14Neh 3:3Neh 12:39

Disputed

Whether the noun "fish" is the original word and the rare verb "to multiply, teem" (used of Ephraim and Manasseh in Genesis 48:16) is a later play on it, or whether the verb is the parent root from which fish were named for their fertility.

  • majorityThe noun "fish" is primary; the verb in Genesis 48:16 is a denominative wordplay drawing on the fish as a stock image of prolific breeding. This is the dominant view in current comparative Semitics.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. דָּג; Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (Macmillan, 1987), s.v.; Alexander Militarev and Leonid Kogan, Semitic Etymological Dictionary II: Animal Names (AOAT 278/2, 2005)
  • minorityThe verb "to multiply, teem" is the parent root, and fish were named from their fecundity.; Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon (trans. Tregelles, 1857), 191-92; TWOT (Harris, Archer, Waltke, 1980), entry 401
Variants

The same word in another spelling or form.

דָּגָה“fish”דָּגָה (dagah) is the feminine collective form of דָּג (dag), the ordinary Hebrew word for fish. It names fish as a group or supply rather than as a single creature, much the way English uses "cattle" for a herd rather than one cow. Genesis uses this form when granting humanity dominion over "the fish of the sea" (Genesis 1:26, 28), and the book of Jonah shifts between both spellings for the very same fish within a few verses: it is דָּג when it first swallows Jonah, דָּגָה once he is praying inside it, then דָּג again when it is commanded to spit him out. The two forms name exactly the same animal; דגה simply carries the shading of a group or mass.

What scholars say about dag

The five major reference works agree on the semantic core: דָּג denotes "fish" as the generic aquatic creature within Israel's tripartite cosmology of sea, sky, and land, distinct from תַּנִּין ("sea-monster") and לִוְיָתָן. The feminine דָּגָה functions almost always as a collective (BDB, 185: "fish, almost always coll."), a shoal, catch, or fish-supply, with the individualizing singular in Jonah 2:2 flagged as exceptional. The lexica diverge only on etymology: Gesenius and TWOT (entry 401) hold the classical verb-primary derivation ("named from their fecundity"), while HALOT, Klein, and the comparative Semitists (Militarev-Kogan SED II; Kogan, Genealogical Classification of Semitic, 2015; Huehnergard) treat the noun as primary and וְיִדְגּוּ in Genesis 48:16 as denominative wordplay, the now-dominant view; DCH excludes etymology programmatically. Comparative philology has downgraded the lexeme from Proto-Semitic to a Northwest-Semitic isogloss (Hebrew plus Ugaritic dg / dgy "fisherman"), since Proto-Semitic "fish" was *nūn- (Akkadian nūnu, Aramaic nūnā), which makes the Genesis 48:16 pun a local lexical asset. On the word's theological grammar, Whitekettle (JSOT 93 [2001] 17-37) shows דְּגַת הַיָּם functions as a primary-level, unindividuated taxon; Milgrom (Leviticus 1-16, AB 3) and Douglas (Leviticus as Literature, 1999) explain why fish, though food (Numbers 11:5; Leviticus 11:9-12), are never sacrifice; Block (Ezekiel 25-48, NICOT) treats the eschatological reversal in Ezekiel 47:9-10. Two etymological folk-links are rejected: the Genesis 48:16 verb as proof of an ancient verbal root, and the derivation of the Philistine god Dagon from דָּג, a medieval folk-etymology (Jerome, Rashi, Radak) universally abandoned since Schmökel (1928); the current consensus (Singer, Syria 69 [1992]; Day, ABD; Feliu, The God Dagan in Bronze Age Syria, 2003) derives Dagan from a grain-word or a pre-Semitic Syrian substratum. The one genuinely open question is the gender alternation of Jonah's fish (2:1-2:11), attested already in the Murabbaʿat scroll: readings range from Sasson's stylistic-insignificance and Tiemeyer's archaic-suffix morphology (VT 2017) to the symbolic/literary readings of Trible and Ackerman.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Brill, 1994-2000), I:213lexicon
  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), 185lexicon
  • DCH (Clines, ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. II (Sheffield, 1995)lexicon
  • G. J. Botterweck, 'דָּג dāgh,' in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament III (Eerdmans, 1978), 132-39theological-dictionary
  • TWOT (Harris, Archer, Waltke), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (1980), entry 401theological-dictionary
  • Alexander Militarev and Leonid Kogan, Semitic Etymological Dictionary II: Animal Names (AOAT 278/2, 2005)monograph
  • Richard Whitekettle, 'Where the Wild Things Are: Primary Level Taxa in Israelite Zoological Thought,' JSOT 93 (2001): 17-37article
  • Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16 (Anchor Bible 3, 1991), 649-62commentary
  • Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 25-48 (NICOT, 1998), 696-99commentary
  • Jack M. Sasson, Jonah (Anchor Bible 24B, 1990), 155-56commentary
  • Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer, 'A New Look at the Biological Sex/Grammatical Gender of Jonah's Fish,' Vetus Testamentum 67 (2017): 307-23article
  • Lluís Feliu, The God Dagan in Bronze Age Syria (CHANE 19, Brill, 2003), 278-87monograph
  • John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (JSOTSup 265, Sheffield, 2000), 85-90monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of דָּג

m p construct

דְּגֵי

Gen 9:2, Num 11:22, Job 12:8, Psa 8:8, Ezk 38:20, Hos 4:3, Hab 1:14, Zep 1:3

m p absolute

דָּגִים

1Ki 4:33, 2Ch 33:14, Neh 3:3, Neh 12:39, Job 41:7, Ecc 9:12, Zep 1:10

m s absolute

דָּג, דָּאג

Jon 1:17, Jon 1:17, Jon 2:10, Neh 13:16