Isaiah 17:10-11 likely condemns Adon's garden cult, denouncing those who plant 'pleasant plants' and 'slips of a strange god.' The prophetic movement rejected Adon's vegetation rites as incompatible with exclusive Yahweh worship.
Adon's annual death was attributed to the forces of death personified by Mot. In later Greek tradition, a wild boar — possibly representing Mot or Resheph — kills the young god Adonis.
Canaanite Adon ('Lord') was the dying-and-rising vegetation god of Byblos whose cult Phoenician traders carried to Greece, where he became Adonis. Roman Adonis was adopted directly from the Greek tradition, with Ovid providing the definitive Latin retelling.
In some Canaanite traditions, Anat played the role of the mourning goddess who lamented Adon's death, paralleling her grief over Baal's death in the Baal Cycle. At Byblos, this role was shared or supplanted by Astarte.
At Byblos, the cult of Adon (Adonis) was closely intertwined with Astarte worship. Astarte mourned the dying god in seasonal rites described by Lucian and other classical authors.
Some scholars identify the boar that kills Adonis with Resheph, the Canaanite god of plague and the underworld. Resheph's destructive power over life parallels the lethal force that annually slays the vegetation god Adon.
Shapash, the sun goddess, played a role in the seasonal cycle that governed Adon's death and resurrection. Her heat ripened the vegetation Adon embodied, and in the Baal Cycle she retrieves the dead storm god from the underworld.
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