Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Tammuz
A dying shepherd god whose women mourners Ezekiel sees weeping at the temple gate.
Ezekiel 8:14, in every translation this tool compares.
Ezekiel is shown women weeping for him at the north gate of the temple, one of four things he is made to look at, each worse than the last. He is usually introduced as a vegetation god, and that is a later simplification. In the Sumerian material he starts out as a shepherd.
Women weeping for him at the north gate of the temple, one of the four escalating abominations Ezekiel is shown. In Sumerian he is Dumuzi, "the good son" or "the right son." DDD corrects the usual description. Dumuzi wasn't originally a vegetation god; he was a shepherd god, and the vegetation traits popular writing hangs on "Tammuz" arrived later, when he absorbed Damu, a separate vegetation deity. DDD reads the next scene in the chapter, men worshipping the sun at the temple entrance (Ezekiel 8:16), as part of the same indictment of Babylonian influence spreading through Jerusalem's cult.
H8542, 1 occ
The claim that Easter descends from Tammuz worship runs through Hislop's The Two Babylons, which is unreliable in all its particulars. In Babylonian myth Tammuz is a beautiful shepherd killed by a boar, a winter figure whom Ishtar mourns and follows into the underworld to bring back, and Ezekiel counts the women weeping for him among the worst of the abominations. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century habit, going back to Frazer, of treating Tammuz, Osiris, Adonis, and Attis as regional versions of one universal Dying and Rising God is flagged by DDD as a category error that lumped distinct deities under one modern label.
- Ezekiel 8:14
- H. Porter, "Tammuz," *International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia* (1915), 2908
- DDD s.v. "Tammuz," 828-833
