Hadad, like Dagon, obtains his right to be included in the list of Phoenician deities solely from the place assigned to him by Philo.  Otherwise he would naturally be viewed as an Aramean god, worshipped especially in Aram-Zobah, and in Syria of Damascus.[1156] In Syria, he was identified with the sun;[1157] and it is possible that in the Phoenician religion he was the Sun-God, worshipped (as we have seen) sometimes independently of Baal.  His image was represented with the solar rays streaming down from it towards the earth, so as to indicate that the earth received from him all that made it fruitful and abundant.[1158] Macrobius connects his name with the Hebrew chad, “one;” but this derivation is improbable.[1159] Philo gives him the title of “King of Gods,” and says that he reigned conjointly with Astarte and Demaroues,[1160] but this does not throw much light on the real Phoenician conception of him.  The local name, Hadad-rimmon,[1161] may seem to connect him with the god Rimmon, likewise a Syrian deity,[1162] and it is quite conceivable that the two words may have been alternative names of the same god, just as Phoebus and Apollo were with the Greeks.  We may conjecture that the Sun was worshipped under both names in Syria, while in Phoenicia Hadad was alone made use of.  The worship of Baal as the Sun, which tended to prevail ever more and more, ousted Hadad from his place, and caused him to pass into oblivion.

Adonis was probably, like Hadad, originally a sun-god; but the myths connected with him gave him, at any rate in the late Phoenician times, a very distinct and definite personality.  He was made the son of Cinryas, a mythic king of Byblus,[1163] and the husband of Astarte or Ashtoreth.  One day, as he chased the wild boar in Lebanon, near the sources of the river of Byblus, the animal which he was hunting turned upon him, and so gored his thigh that he died of the wound.  Henceforth he was mourned annually.  At the turn of the summer solstice, the anniversary of his death, all the women of Byblus went in a wild procession to Aphaca, in the Lebanon, where his temple stood, and wept and wailed on account of his death.  The river, which his blood had once actually stained, turned red to show its sympathy with the mourners, and was thought to flow with his blood afresh.  After the “weeping for Tammuz"[1164] had continued for a definite time, the mourning terminated with the burial of an image of the god in the sacred precinct.  Next day Adonis was supposed to return to life; his image was disinterred and carried back to the temple with music and dances, and every circumstance of rejoicing.[1165] Wild orgies followed, and Aphaca became notorious for scenes to which it will be necessary to recur hereafter.  The Adonis myth is generally explained as representing either the perpetually recurrent decay and recovery of nature, or the declension of the Sun as he moves from the summer to the winter constellations, and his subsequent return and reappearance in all his strength.  But myths obtained a powerful hold on ancient imaginations, and the worshippers of Adonis probably in most cases forgot the symbolical character of his cult, and looked on him as a divine or heroic personage, who had actually gone through all the adventures ascribed to him in the legend.  Hence the peculiarly local character of his worship, of which we find traces only at Byblus and at Jerusalem.