ADADREMMON (Hebrew: Hadad-rimmôn). — A term that occurs only in Zech. 12:11, where the prophet, foretelling the death of the Messiah (v. 10), compares the mourning that will then take place to “the mourning of Hadad-Rimmôn in the valley of Megiddon.”
According to St. Jerome (In Zach. 12:11: PL 25, 1515), A. would be the locality Maximianopolis, today Rummanch near Megiddo (v. MAGEDDO), where King Josiah died in battle; this occasioned profound national mourning (2 Chron. 35:24-25). This identification is supported by A. Legendre (DB, I, cols. 167-70) and many others. But noting that A. as a locality is not attested elsewhere and that Megiddo is not Megiddo, Van Hoonacker, relying on the Septuagint, which reads only Rimmôn without Adad, corrects the text: “Like the mourning of Rimmôn in the valley of Migrôn” (the interchange of r and d in the Hebrew text is not uncommon). Rimmôn (Vulgate: Remmôn) is a rock that stands near Migrôn (Vulgate: Magron) on the road to Gibeah (1 Sam. 14:1; Judg. 20:45-47; 21:13). On that rock the 600 Benjaminites who had escaped the massacre of their tribe took refuge (Judg. 20-21); Zechariah would compare to this mourning the mourning for the death of the Messiah.
On the manifold textual and exegetical hypotheses concerning the messianic “weeping of A.,” cf. G. F. Re, Dizionario di erudizione biblica, I, Turin 1891, pp. 319-24, who justly rejects the allusion to the “mourning of Adonis,” a view upheld by many critics after Hitzig, Reuss, and Wellhausen.
For the exegesis of Zech. 12:10-11, cf. A. Skrinjar, in Verbum Domini, II (1931), pp. 233-42. Gaetano M. Perrella