The Dying and Rising God

Jonathan Z. Smith called the category 'largely a misnomer' in 1987. In 2001 Tryggve Mettinger defended it for a few gods, among them Dumuzi, Baal and Melqart.

Jonathan Z. Smith, 'Dying and Rising Gods', in Mircea Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987); Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: 'Dying and Rising Gods' in the Ancient Near East (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001), as reviewed by Richard S. Hess (2004)

A scholarly category, from James Frazer, for gods such as Osiris, Adonis and Attis who die and return.

Sources3 sources

Primary source

James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., Part IV: Adonis, Attis, Osiris, vol. I, 1914, Book I, ch. I, p. 6Frazer's own reading of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis and Attis as one god personifying the yearly decay and revival of plant life
the yearly decay and revival of life, especially of vegetable life, which they personified as a god who annually died and rose again from the dead

Scholarship

Jonathan Z. Smith, Dying and Rising Gods, in The Encyclopedia of Religion, 1987, opening paragraphSmith's 1987 judgement that the category is largely a misnomer resting on late or ambiguous texts
largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts
Richard S. Hess, Review of Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection (2001), Denver Journal, 2004Mettinger's 2001 defence of dying and rising for a few Near Eastern gods, among them Baal, Melqart and Dumuzi
Melqart of Tyre (i.e., the Greek Herakles) may have been a dying and rising god