In early modern scholarship, a cult to a supposed Heliopolitan Triad of Jupiter Heliopolitanus, Venus and Mercury (or Dionysus) was thought to have originated in ancient Canaanite religion, adopted and adapted firstly by the Greeks, and then by the Romans when they colonised the city of Heliopolis (modern Baalbeck) in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon.
The Canaanite god Baʿal (Hadad) was equated with Jupiter Heliopolitanus as sun-god, Astarte or Atargatis with Venus Heliopolitana as his wife, and Adon, the god of spring, with either Mercury or Dionysus as third member of the triad, son of Heliopolitan Venus and Heliopolitan Jupiter.
[3] Kropp asserts that especially with reference to Heliopolis, compounded identities such as Jupiter-Haddad, or Venus-Atargatis, et al are "never addressed with Semitic names, and rarely if ever depicted with visual contaminations.
[6] Some very late (4th century) and extravagant claims by Macrobius for multiple aspects of single or compounded identities involve a plethora of Roman, Greek and mid-eastern deities, including Jupiter of Heliopolis as a sun-god, at least partly on the grounds that "Helios" is a Greek name for the sun, and the sun-god.
There is, however, no archaeological, epigraphic or iconographic evidence for any stable, familial or functionally effective triple grouping within the near-endless and various native Heliopolitan or Canaanite pantheons, and none for the clear equivalence of leading Roman and Heliopolitan deities either prior to the likely Roman occupation during Rome's civil wars, in Julius Caesar's time at the earliest, or its promotion as a colony some 100 years later.