Review of “Dagon” (1919)
H. P. Lovecraft (writer).
1 Samuel (ca. 620–500 BCE), chapter 5, mentions Dagon as the national god of the Philistines. It enters a grudge match with Yahweh by proxy of their idols. The name was probably derived from a word for grain, but in some Assyrian art, Dagon appears fishlike. This latter association supposedly came from a similarity in pronunciation between “Dagon” and the Canaanite Tiberian Hebrew word for fish. There’s no need to read the biblical passages before this story.
References here: “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), Dagon (2001).