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TAMMUZ

(Heb. tammûz; Sum. Dumuzi)

A Mesopotamian deity attested from the 3rd–1st millennia b.c.e. While the variety of traditions portraying Tammuz almost defies a singular and coherent characterization of the deity, he is represented consistently as a young man who dies too young, the object of women’s grief. The literature focuses on his marriage to Inanna/Ishtar and his premature death. Sumerian myth relates how the young shepherd-god Dumuzi, murdered while tending his flock in the desert, was mourned by his mother, sister, and wife. Lamentation for Dumuzi, the subject of songs and liturgical compositions in Sumerian and Akkadian, was observed annually in ritual form, probably during the fourth month, which in the Babylonian calendar bears his name (Duʾuzu, June-July; cf. Ezek. 8:1, 14). Mesopotamian worship of Dumuzi, who was not among the chief gods, was popular in nature and mostly distinct from the official religion of festivals and temple cult. Ezekiel’s portrayal of the predominantly female worship of Dumuzi (Ezek. 8:14) is consistent with the following: a reference to large numbers of women mourning (apparently) for Dumuzi at Mari (ARM 9:175); the preponderance of emesal (a literary dialect of Sumerian employed for women’s speech) in 1st-millennium texts about Dumuzi; and the persistence of ritual mourning for Taʾuz (Tammuz) into the 10th century c.e. among Sabean women in Harran.

The influential view of James G. Frazer and S. H. Langdon, that Tammuz was a “dying and rising” vegetation deity corresponding to Egyptian Osiris and Phoenician/Greek Adonis, is no longer viable. It is only in Dumuzi’s identification with other minor gods that he takes on the attributes of a seasonal vegetation deity. The only evidence for Tammuz’ return from the dead (a fragmentary passage in the Akkadian myth, The Descent of Ishtar to the Netherworld) is disputed. The Vulg. of Ezek. 8:14 substitutes the name Adonis for Tammuz, implying an equation of the two gods that is otherwise first attested in Origen. There is no evidence either to support or deny that “the beloved of women” (Heb. ḥemdaṯ nāšîm) in Dan. 11:37 is Tammuz or Adonis.

Bibliography. B. Alster, “Tammuz,” DDD, 828-34; O. R. Gurney, “Tammuz Reconsidered: Some Recent Developments,” JSS 7 (1962): 147-60; T. Jacobsen, “Toward the Image of Tammuz,” HR 1 (1961): 189-213; repr. in Toward the Image of Tammuz, ed. W. L. Moran (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 73-101; R. Kutscher, “The Cult of Dumuzi/Tammuz,” in Bar-Ilan Studies in Assyriology Dedicated to Pinhas Artzi, ed. J. Klein and A. Skaist (Ramat Gan, 1990), 29-44.

Joel Burnett

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

TAMMUZ

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)