Adrammelech (Adramelech, Adramelek) (the lordship of Melech, the king) In Near Eastern mythology, a god worshipped by the people of Sepharvaim. According to 2 Kings (17:31), the “Sepharvites burnt their children in fire to Adrammelech and Anammelech, the gods of Sepharvaim.”
In later Jewish folklore Adrammelech was turned into one of the 10 Archdemons, who often appeared in animal forms such as that of a peacock, mule, horse, or lion. In Milton’s Paradise Lost (book 6:365) the good angels Uriel and Raphael vanquish Adrammelech. The German poet Klopstock, in his epic poem The Messiah, calls Adrammelech “the enemy of God, greater in malice, ambition, and mischief than Satan, a fiend more curst, a deeper hypocrite.”
Adrammelech may be derived from the Babylonian god Anu and the Ammonite god Moloch, to whom children were sacrificed. The name is also used for a son of Sennacherib in 2 Kings (19:37), who with Sharezer, his brother, murdered his father in the temple of the god Nisroch after they learned their father planned to sacrifice them to the god.
The name appears in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews (book 16, chapter 8) as Andromachos and in Greek sources as Adramelos and Ardumuzan.
SOURCE:
Encyclopedia of World Mythology and Legend, Third Edition – Written by Anthony S. Mercatante & James R. Dow
Copyright © 2009 by Anthony S. Mercatante