Tammuz

Tammuz , ancient nature deity worshiped in Babylonia. A god of agriculture and flocks, he personified the creative powers of spring. He was loved by the fertility goddess Ishtar , who, according to one legend, was so grief-stricken at his death that she contrived to enter the underworld to get him back. According to another legend, she killed him and later restored him to life. These legends and his festival, commemorating the yearly death and rebirth of vegetation, corresponded to the festivals of the Phoenician and Greek Adonis and of the Phrygian Attis . The Sumerian name of Tammuz was Dumuzi. In the Bible his disappearance is mourned by the women of Jerusalem (Ezek. 8.14).

Tammuz a Mesopotamian god, lover of Ishtar and similar in some respects to the Greek Adonis. He became the personification of the seasonal death and rebirth of crops.

Tammuz A Mesopotamian deity of the underworld, sometimes thought to have been the focus of a cult which worshipped him as a dying and rising god—mourned in autumn when vegetation seemed to die, and celebrated in spring as the crops began to grow. The cult sometimes endangered the purity of worship in Israel, as when Ezekiel saw women weeping for Tammuz in the Temple (Ezek. 8: 14). However, this interpretation of Tammuz is speculative; the women may well have been engaged only in a mourning rite.