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The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Hadad / Rimmon
The Syrian storm god, named when a foreign general asks to be excused for bowing in his temple.
The Syrian storm god, Baal's opposite number further north. He gets named because a foreign general asks to be excused in advance for bowing in his temple, since the job requires him to stand beside a king who leans on his arm.
The Aramean storm god, Baal's Syrian counterpart, named when Naaman asks to be excused for bowing in his master's temple. Zechariah's Hadad-rimmon keeps the double name.
H7417 (רִמּוֹן), 16 occ, mostly the place name, refs (the god): 2 Kings 5:18; Zechariah 12:11
Hadad is the proper name behind the title Baal across the Levant, one storm god going by local names under the "Baal" title: Hadad in Syria, Melqart in Tyre, and on one scholarly line Chemosh in Moab and Milkom in Ammon. This file's own Chemosh and Milcom entries treat those two as separate gods and not as local Baal titles, and the tension between the sources stays on the page. DDD's Hadad article derives the name from a word for "thunderer" and follows him from Old Akkadian Adad through Ebla, Mari, and Ugarit, where he is called son of Dagan and fights Yam for a palace on Mount Sapanu in the same myth told of Baal, into the first-millennium Aramean pantheon, where he heads the pantheon at Damascus and is credited by name in the Tel Dan and Zakkur inscriptions with making and unmaking kings. DDD proposes a subsidiary deity, Hadad-milki, attested as a name element at Gozan, as the god behind the Adrammelech of 2 Kings 17:31.
- DDD s.v. "Hadad," 378-381
- Kelley, "Hadad," *Lexham Bible Dictionary*
- D. I. Block, "God," DOT:Historical Books, 341
