Table of Contents
Hadad … was the storm- and rain-god in the Canaanite and ancient Mesopotamian religions. He was attested in Ebla as "Hadda" in c. 2500 BCE.
Wikipedia, Hadad
Names and spellings
The Baal page keeps pointing to a second name. Hadad is that name.
Scribes spelled it in many ways. In Ugarit it was Haddu. In Akkadian it was Adad. In Sumerian it was Iškur. In Aramaic and Hebrew it also appears as Rimmon, and the Akkadians sometimes wrote Rammanu.
Several of these spellings already appear on this site. The Anunnaki gods list has one line for “Adad – God of storms and rain” and a second line for “Ishkur – God of thunderstorms and rain”. Those are one god in two languages. The Chaldean flood text that Ignatius Donnelly quotes on my Deluge of the Chaldeans page calls him Ramman.
Wikipedia lists more titles for the same god: “Rimon/Rimmon, Pidar, Rapiu, Baal-Zephon, or often simply Baʿal (Lord)”. Hadad is also the name of kings and of the people who served them. I come back to that in the section on Damascus.
What the name means
Rammanu is the clearest case, because the meaning is written into it.
In Akkadian, Adad is also known as Rammanu ("Thunderer")
Wikipedia, Hadad
So the name that scribes wrote for him was simply a description of what he did.
Ugarit and the Baal Cycle
The best-known stories about Hadad come from Ugarit, a city on the coast of modern Syria. The Baal Cycle on its clay tablets dates to roughly 1400 to 1200 BCE. In it Hadad is called Baal, and the stories are about him.
Wikipedia sums up his job in those texts:
In religious texts, Ba‘al/Hadad is the lord of the sky who governs rain and crops, master of fertility and protector of life and growth. His absence brings drought, starvation, and chaos.
Wikipedia, Hadad
The first tablets tell how Hadad beats Yamm, the Sea. The craftsman god Kothar-wa-Khasis forges two clubs and names them. In the translation by the Good Works Library, the goddess Ashtoreth stops Hadad when he keeps hitting the beaten Sea:
Shame on you, Rider of the Clouds! For Prince Yamm is our captive, Judge Nahar is our captive.
Baal Cycle, KTU 1.2 IV, translation by the Good Works Library
Remember the title “Rider of the Clouds”. The Bible gives it to Yahweh. Wikipedia calls it “a phrase applied by editors of modern English Bibles to Yahweh in Psalm 68.4”.
Wikipedia adds that the Ugaritic tradition made Hadad a son of Dagon, while the usual Mesopotamian tradition makes him a son of Anu and Uraš.
My video notes on The Baal Cycle, from the Disciple Dojo series, use the same picture. They call him “The storm god, referred to as the “cloud rider,” residing on Mount Sapan.”
His mountain has its own page on this site. The Mount Zaphon page says: “It is the sacred peak of Baal (Hadad). Most researchers identify it with Jebel al-Aqra.” The same page quotes the order for his palace, from tablet 4 of the Baal Cycle:
Depart, Kothar-wa-KHasisu. Hurry, build a house. Hurry, raise a palace. Hurry, build a house. Hurry, start raising a palace in the midst of the high places of Sapanu, the house holding 1,000 fields. the palace holding 10,000 plots.
Baal Cycle, tablet 4 (KTU 1.4 V 50-57), as quoted on my Mount Zaphon page
The storm god in Israel’s psalms
The “Rider of the Clouds” title did not stay in Ugarit. Mauro Biglino points at it in his article “Yahweh versus Baal: the war between the gods of the Bible”. He writes: “Baal is also called the ‘knight of the clouds’, an epithet which in the Bible is also applied to Yahweh.” Biglino does not name Hadad in that article. He is talking about Baal.
The verse he means sits on my Jah and the Bull page. Psalm 68:4 reads there: “Sing to God, sing praises to His name; exalt Him who rides on the clouds by His name Jah.”
Psalm 29 goes further. In my Editorial Insertion of Yahweh page I noted that “This psalm praises Yahweh using language strikingly similar to Canaanite hymns to Baal, the storm god. Some scholars argue it was originally a Baal hymn adapted to Yahweh worship.” The Esoterica video on Baal makes the same point and then adds: “The similarities between Baal and Yahweh, both storm gods, created theological competition in the region.”
I find that competition worth keeping in mind when I read Elijah on Carmel below.
Adad in Mesopotamia and the flood
Amorites carried Hadad east. Wikipedia says so directly:
From the Levant, Hadad was introduced to Mesopotamia by the Amorites
Wikipedia, Hadad
Not every source agrees about the direction. The Esoterica quote on my Baal page has him travel the other way, from Mesopotamia west to Canaan. I leave both on the table.
In Babylon he was Adad, and his symbol was the bull. Wikipedia describes the usual picture: “often holding a club and thunderbolt and wearing a bull-horned headdress”. A Sumerian litany calls Iškur “great radiant bull, your name is heaven”.
His two faces were already noted in antiquity. A text from the reign of Ur-Ninurta shows “the two sides of Adad/Iškur as threatening in his stormy rage, and benevolent in giving life”.
The Mesopotamian flood stories gave Adad his biggest scenes. In Atrahasis, the god Enlil cannot sleep because of human noise. He asks the other gods to cut the food supply, and he names Adad:
He addressed the great gods, 'The noise of mankind has become too much. I am losing sleep over their racket. Cut off food supplies to the people! Let the vegetation be too scant for their hunger! Let Adad wipe away his rain.
Atrahasis, Tablet I, trans. Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia
Then the god Enki, who sides with the humans, finds a way around it. He tells the elders to bring gifts to Adad, and Adad gives in:
He made mist form in the morning And in the night he stole out and made dew drop
Atrahasis, Tablet II, trans. Stephanie Dalley
The text says Adad “was shamed by the presents”, and he works against Enlil’s order in secret.
My own Atrahasis page carries the full Dalley text, and Adad appears in it many times. My page has a slightly different wording of Enlil’s famine order:
Let Adad on high make his rain scarce, Let him block below, and not raise flood-water from the springs!
Enlil, Atrahasis, trans. Stephanie Dalley, as on my Atrahasis page
Under that order the Atrahasis page carries a note: “So if the temple of Adad was a water producing factory, it was connected through a network of channels”. The note is not Dalley’s wording.
Enlil also recalls how the gods once divided the work among themselves:
We, the great Anunna, all of us, Agreed together on a plan. Anu and Adad were to guard above, I was to guard the earth below.
Enlil, Atrahasis, trans. Stephanie Dalley, as on my Atrahasis page
So in this poem Adad shares the sky with Anu, the head of the Anunnaki, and Enlil keeps the earth. Earlier in the poem Enlil gives the order that locks the sky: “Command that Anu and Adad keep the (air) above (earth) locked”.
The flood is a different matter. When it comes, Adad is the one who brings it. In Atrahasis, as Dalley translates it:
The face of the weather changed. Adad bellowed from the clouds.
Atrahasis, Tablet III, trans. Stephanie Dalley
Gilgamesh Tablet XI repeats this scene for Utnapishtim. In N. K. Sandars’s translation:
With the first light of dawn a black cloud came from the horizon; it thundered within where Adad, Lord of the storm was riding.
Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI, trans. N. K. Sandars
A closer translation by Andrew George puts it this way: “within it did Adad bellow continually.”
An Atlantis author gave the same scene a different name for the god. Ignatius Donnelly quotes François Lenormant, who gives George Smith’s reading of the Nineveh tablets. My Deluge of the Chaldeans page has the whole passage. The storm god is Ramman there: “Ramman thundered in the midst of the cloud”, and later “The inundation of Ramman swelled up to the sky”.
Donnelly reads that flood as a memory of Atlantis. He says the Chaldean story points to “the land of Chronos, or Saturn” and to “the dominion of Atlantis”. I do not take that as settled, but Donnelly does tie the thunderer of the flood to a lost island.
In both, the order comes from the council of gods and Adad is the weather that carries it out. Paul Wallis reads the Bible’s Noah the same way. In his words from The 5th Kind interview, “Enlil wants a cull, wants to get rid of the human beings, just the same as the Yahweh character in the Bible.” Wallis does not name Adad in the passage I read.
Wikipedia notes that Enki gave Iškur his post: “When Enki distributed the destinies, he made Iškur inspector of the cosmos.”
My numerology page shows where the Babylonian priests ranked him. It says: “Anu was represented by the number 60, Enlil by 50, Ea by 40, Sin, the moon god, by 30, Shamash by 20, Ishtar by 15, and Adad, the god of storms, by 6.” So Adad had a seat in the divine hierarchy, but a low number.
Wikipedia treats Enlil and Adad as two gods, and says Adad is “sometimes described as the son of Enlil”. Some channeled material on my site reads it differently, and I give that its own section below. For the flood story itself, see Utnapishtim, Ziusudra and Noah.
Damascus, Aleppo and Rimmon
Hadad’s home city was Aleppo. Wikipedia’s page on its citadel says the city “became the capital of Yamhad and was known as the “City of Hadad"". Wikipedia says the temple of the storm god on that hill was in use from the 24th century BCE to at least the 9th century BCE.
A king of Yamhad called himself “beloved of Hadad”. A stele of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser I calls Hadad “the god of Aleppo”.
In Damascus the kings carried the god’s name. Wikipedia says “Later Aramean kings of Damascus seem to have habitually assumed the title of Ben-Hadad (son of Hadad)”. A colossal statue of Hadad from Gerdshin, near Sam’al, dates to 775 BCE and is in the Pergamon Museum.
My page on King Hezekiah’s religious reforms puts Aram-Damascus on its list of neighbouring cults. It names Hadad as the god of the Arameans and pairs him with Rimmon.
Wikipedia reports that many scholars formerly took Rammanu for a separate Akkadian god, and that he was later identified with Hadad. The Hebrew form Rimmôn is spelled the same as the word for pomegranate, and Wikipedia says this “may be an intentional misspelling and/or parody of the deity’s original name”.
Hadad in the Bible
The Bible never names Hadad as a god. His name is on kings and on a temple.
Asa of Judah paid a king of Damascus to attack Israel:
and king Asa sent them to Benhadad, the son of Tabrimon, the son of Hezion, king of Syria, that dwelt at Damascus, saying,
1 Kings 15:18 (KJV)
A later Ben-Hadad besieged Samaria:
And Benhadad the king of Syria gathered all his host together: and there were thirty and two kings with him, and horses, and chariots; and he went up and besieged Samaria, and warred against it.
1 Kings 20:1 (KJV)
The name means “son of Hadad”. The kings of Damascus used it as a throne name.
Rimmon is the god himself, and the Bible mentions his house. Naaman, a Syrian officer, asks for a pardon for something he knows he will still do:
when my master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon
2 Kings 5:18 (KJV)
Naaman does not say Rimmon is false. He asks the LORD to forgive him for bowing in Rimmon’s house. This is one more place where I see a Bible character treat two powers as real.
Zechariah has the strangest line:
In that day shall there be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of Hadadrimmon in the valley of Megiddon.
Zechariah 12:11 (KJV)
Wikipedia reports that older Christian writers linked the mourning to the death of Josiah. Others suspected that Hadad-rimmon was a dying and rising god, like Adonis or Tammuz. Wikipedia adds: “No further evidence has come to light to resolve such speculations.” I think both options are worth keeping.
Wikipedia also records that John Day thinks Jezebel’s Baal, whom Elijah fought, “was possibly Baʿal Shamem (Lord of the Heavens), a title most often applied to Hadad”. If Day is right, Elijah on Mount Carmel was facing Hadad’s own cult.
Biglino reads Carmel as a contest between Elohim. In his article he says “Elijah does not say that Baal does not exist.” I think that fits a Hadad cult too, because a rival is only a rival if he is real.
One more possible trace of Hadad is in Isaiah 66:17, which the Hierarchy of YHWH page covers. The verse has worshippers following “one in the middle”. Lowth translated it “after the rites of Achad” and tied Achad to Adad. Macrobius says in his Saturnalia 1.23 that the Assyrians called their highest god Adad, a name meaning “one”. Delitzsch called that etymology “a mere fancy”. I treat it as a long shot.
Ben-Hadad also shows up in my notes on Nimrod. The video page summarizes Peter Machinist’s Anchor Bible Dictionary entry. It lists scholars who tried to match Nimrod with historical figures, including “Aramaean rulers like Ben-Hadad”.
Hadad and Baal: a name or a title
Baal means “lord”. Many gods were called Baal, and Hadad was one of them. Wikipedia says Hadad was often called simply Baal, “however, the latter title was also used for other gods”.
Biglino says the same thing from another direction: “Baal did not originate as a proper name. It originated as an epithet.” He adds that “The Bible mentions many Baals: Baal Berith, Baal Hammon, Baal Peor, Baal Zebub, Baal Zefon and others besides.”
So I read “Baal” in the Bible with care. In many verses it can mean Hadad. In others it can mean a local lord of a town or a mountain. For the Baal who gets full treatment on this site, go to Baal.
The Hyksos linked him to Egypt. In their capital Avaris they worshipped him as “Set of Avaris”, Wikipedia says, and so Hadad became tied to Seth. Wikipedia lists the grain goddess Shala as his Mesopotamian consort.
Channeled and esoteric voices on my site
The channeled and esoteric sources below do not use the name Hadad. They use Baal.
The Family of Taygeta, a Pleiadian channeling group, ties Baal to Enlil instead. Kab, one of its voices, says this on X:
Yahweh-Jehovah was basically a fictional character made by combining aspects of Enki and Enlil, but primary Enki as he was made to be an adversary of Baal, the storm god, who is Enlil.
Kab, Family of Taygeta
My Baal page explains their route: they tie Enlil to “Bel” (Akkadian for “lord”), and then claim that “Bel” turned into “Baal”. This is a different line from the one Wikipedia draws, where Baal is Hadad’s title. Kab’s reading would make the Ugaritic storm god Enlil, not Hadad. I do not think the texts decide this, so I list both.
Oahspe does not name Hadad either. It has Baal as a heavenly Lord who ruled mortals for three thousand years. In the Book of Wars, Baal takes the floor at a gathering of the Gods:
After him spake Baal, whose heavenly kingdom was over Heleste and the south end of Jaffeth to the sea, a young Lord of great promise.
Oahspe, Book of Wars Against Jehovih
The end of his rule is told in the Book of Esra:
Such was the end of the earthly dominion of Baal, who had ruled over mortals for evil, for upward of three thousand years.
Oahspe, Book of Esra
My false gods in Oahspe page sums him up as a Lord who “inspires violent worship in Canaan and Greece (as Baal or Zeus)”.
Andrew Tomas, in his Atlantis book, belongs here too. My summary of his 1972 book lists ever-burning lamps from the ancient world, and one entry reads “Luminous stones in the temple of Hadad at Baalbek”. I have not checked that line against Tomas’s own text. It is the only line on my site that names a temple of Hadad at Baalbek.
Hadad and the Gods of the Bible
Hadad shows how many names the Bible’s world gave one kind of power. Wallis says it plainly: “Yahweh is one of the Elohim”. My pages on Elohim and The Gods in the Bible follow that trail, and the second one lists Hadad under his Aramean name, Rimmon.
