Tammuz and the Bible

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Tammuz and the BibleAuthor(s): Edwin M. YamauchiSource: Journal of Biblical Literature, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Sep., 1965), pp. 283-290Published by: The Society of Biblical LiteratureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3265029 .

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TAMMUZ AND THE BIBLE

EDWIN M. YAMAUCHI

RUTGERS- THE STATE UNIVERSITY

ONE of the most interesting pursuits of the biblical scholar is the

search for allusions in the Bible to Canaanite and to Mesopotamian

mythology. A fruitful source of comparison has been the Mesopotamian

myth of "Ishtar's Descent to the Underworld." Parallels and allusions

to it have been found by scholars in the OT, the NT, and in the apocry-

phal writings.

Alfred Jeremias, for example, saw the Tammuz myth reflected inthe Joseph story. He wrote, "The sojourn with the slave-dealers is held

to be a tarrying in the Underworld. ... The prison is likewise the Under-

world."' W. F. Albright, who rejected the astral emphasis of Jeremias,also considered Joseph a type of the dying god: "Being Adonis, Josephhad, of course, to die. ... Jacob's weeping for Joseph is the reflexion of

the wailing of the devotees, like Ishtar's lament for Tammuz, or Demeter's

mourning for Kore."'

Some twenty years after Albright's article in 1918 cited above,

W. E. Staples also identified Joseph with Tammuz and extended theidentification to Moses.

Just as Tammuz rose fromthe dead to bring prosperityto his country, Josephwent up out of prison to become 'Adon or Adonis of Egypt and the savior of the

people.Tammuz was rescued and loved by Ishtar, the queen of heaven; Moses was

rescued and loved by the daughter of the pharaoh, who, as daughter of the

pharaoh,was also queen of heaven.... As Tammuz died for his people, so Mosessacrificedhis own life for the welfareof his people.3

Somewhat similarly Haupt reduced the story of Esther to a myth ofIshtar and of Marduk, symbolising the triumph of spring over winter.

Theophile Meek has explained the Song of Solomon as a liturgy of the

Tammuz cult.4 In his exegesis of ch. 3 of Canticles he says, "Here and

in vss. 2-4 we have once again the motif of seeking and finding as well

as the reference to watchmen impeding the way... reminding us of

the watchmen that Ishtar had to pass to get into the underworld to

bring back her dead lord to life and thus bring new life into the world."s

I AlfredJeremias, The Old Testament n theLightof theAncientEast, II, ch. 17.2 W. F. Albright, "Historical and Mythical Elements in the Story of Joseph,"

JBL, 37 (1918), pp. 119-20.3 W. E. Staples, "Cultic Motifs in HebrewThought," AJSL, 55 (1938), pp. 47-48.4 T. J. Meek, "Babylonian Parallels to the Song of Songs," JBL, 43 (1924),

pp. 242-52; "The Song of Songs and the Fertility Cult," in The Song of Songs, ed.WilfredSchoff,pp. 48-79.

s The Interpreter's ible, v, p. 118.283



JOURNAL OF BIBLICAL LITERATURE

William A. Irwin has discovered allusions to Ishtar's Descent in

Job 19. He notes, "In vs. 9 he is stripped of his 'glory,' whatever that

term may imply as actuality or allusion, and the diadem is removedfrom his head- we almost gasp in astonishment: this is precisely the

first indignity suffered by Ishtar inside the first gate. .."6

Many writers have also seen in Tammuz a prototype of Christ.

Paul Carus, for example, says, "The ancient Tammuz is one of the

most important prototypes of Christ. He is a god-man, an incarnation

of the deity who is born as a human being, dies in the course of time

and wakes to life again."7 Torgny Save-Soderbergh, commenting on

the teaching of the resurrection of Osiris, remarks:

The teaching has its counterpart, for example, in Mesopotamia's cult of

Tamuzd (sic). This Near Eastern faith in a god who dies, but is resurrected,who

can grant man the sought-after immortality, is no doubt an important back-

groundalso to the Christian belief in immortality. .. .8

Drawing upon Christian theology, Leo Oppenheim suggests a soterio-

logical motive for Ishtar's descent. He speculates that if the conclusion

to the poem were found, "it would indicate that it was the very purposeof her descent to the Netherworld to 'redeem' these 'lost' souls even at

the cost of her 'life' and tobring

them - for aspecific

festival of the

dead - to her temple Eanna in Uruk."9

In apocryphal literature the theme of Christ's descent into Hades to

liberate the saints was a favorite motif. In the Book of the Resurrection

of Christ by Bartholomew the Apostle, we read that Jesus "wroughthavoc in Hell, breaking the doors, binding the demons Beliar and

Melkir... and delivered Adam and the holy souls."I? T. Francis Glasson

suggests that "The Christian legend of the Harrowing of Hell .. seems

to be connected ultimately with the descent of Istar (sic) and its wider

applications."" Likewise the descent of the Mother into the LowerWorld to save Adam has been referred by Bousset and others to the

Descent of Ishtar.

In addition to his importance in these literary allusions, the figureof Tammuz has gained added stature in that he has been considered to

be the prototype of the dying and rising vegetation god. Sir JamesFrazer in his monumental work, The Golden Bough, identified Tammuz

along with Adonis, Attis, and Osiris as manifestations of such a dying god.

6 W. A. Irwin, "Job's Redeemer," JBL, 81 (1962), p. 221.

7 Cited by Wilfred Schoff in "Tammuz, Pan, and Christ," The Open Court,26(1912), p. 545.

8 Torgny Save-S6derbergh,Pharaohsand Mortals,p. 256.9A. Leo Oppenheim, "Mesopotamian Mythology III," Orientalia, 19 (1950),

p. 139.

IoM. R. James, TheApocryphalNew Testament,p. 183.

I T. Francis Glasson, "The Descent of Istar (sic): from Ashtoreth to the Incarna-

tion," Congregational uarterly, 2 (1954), p. 316.

284



YAMAUCHI: TAMMUZ AND THE BIBLE

The Cuneiform vidence

In the Bible itself there is but one mention of Tammuz in Ezek 8 14,where the prophet finds some women of Jerusalem weeping for him.

When we turn to the cuneiform texts, we find little if any evidence for

the assumed resurrection of Tammuz. We have Sumerian texts from

the 18th century B.C. showing that the kings of Sumer were identified

with Dumuzi (the Sumerian name for Tammuz), and other texts showingthat the kings of Sumer were to be "married" to the goddess Inanna

(the Sumerian name for Ishtar). There is, for example, a hymn which

contains a description of a hieros gamos or "sacred marriage" ceremony

on the New Year between the king Iddin-Dagan (ca. 1900 B.C.) and the

goddess Inanna, who was probably represented by a hierodoule.12

But granted that there is evidence for a Tammuz cult, what is the

evidence for the resurrection of Tammuz? To answer this we must re-

view the interesting history of the texts of the Sumerian and of the

Akkadian versions of this myth. Although the basic features of the storyare the same, the Akkadian version has omitted some elements and

has added others. The most important difference of the extant recon-

structions comes at the end of the myth. The Akkadian version remains

obscure here, but we now have a good reconstruction of the end of the

Sumerian, thanks to newly published tablets.

The Sumerian text of nearly 400 lines comes from the 18th century

B.C., but was probably composed considerably earlier. The tablets

which have been used to reconstruct the text were discovered by the

University of Pennsylvania expedition at Nippur at the turn of the

century. Unfortunately the tablets were arbitrarily divided between

the museum at Istanbul in Turkey and the University Museum at

Philadelphia.It is

largely throughthe

untiringefforts of Samuel Noah

Kramer that we have a fairly complete text today.'3He first published a translation of the text in RA, 34 (1937), pp. 93-

134. A second edition including new materials appeared in PAPS,

85 (1942), pp. 293-323. His third edition, published in ANET in 1950,

reprinted in 1955, is not the most complete edition now available,

although it is the most accessible one. His fourth edition with the in-

clusion of an important tablet from Yale was published in JCS, 5 (1951),

pp. 1-17. A translation of the Yale tablet may also be found in his

HistoryBeginsat Sumer,pp. 165-67.In 1960 Kramer succeeded in assembling 30 fragments of the myth"The Death of Dumuzi," dating from about 1750 B.C. This is not an

I2 S. N. Kramer,"CuneiformStudies and the History of Literature: The Sumerian

SacredMarriageTexts," PAPS, 107 (1963), pp. 485-527.13 I would like to acknowledgemy great debt to Professor Kramerfor his generous

aid and helpful corrections n the preparationof this article.

285




integral part of the Descent of Inanna but is nonetheless intimatelyconnected with it. Translations of this important myth may be found in

Mythologies of the Ancient World, (ed. by Kramer), pp. 110-15, and inhis latest book, The Sumerians, pp. 156-60.

The Akkadian version, containing a little more than 100 lines, comes

to us from about a millennium later than the Sumerian version. There

are two major recensions: one comes from about 1000 B.C. from Ashur

and the other from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the

middle of the 7th century B.C. The most recent English translation is

that by E. A. Speiser in ANET, pp. 107-09. [In our subsequent dis-

cussion we shall use the abbreviations: S. for the Sumerian version

and A. for the Akkadian version, with the numbers of the lines in

parentheses.]It is not clear from A. why the goddess made her descent. From S.

(188-89): "My daughter has demanded the '[great] above,' has demanded

the 'great below,'" it appears that Inanna wished to have dominion

not only over heaven but also over the underworld as well. The tradi-

tional view that she descended to resurrect her husband Dumuzi, as

maintained by Falkenstein and Witzel,I4 can no longer be maintained,

as we shall see.

The arrival of the goddess at the underworld, the "palace, the lapislazuli mountain," is more graphically described in A. than in S. Ishtar

threatens the gatekeeper, warning him:

If thou openest not the gate so that I cannot enter,I will smash the door, I will shatter the bolt,I will raise up the dead, eating the living,So that the dead will outnumberthe living - A. (16, 17, 19, 20).

These last lines are extremely interesting. The Ashur version reads,

"So that the living will outnumber the dead." In either case Ishtarthreatens to raise and to liberate the dead. It is very significant that

the promise of a resurrection is viewed here not as a hope but as a

calamity. In both versions the goddess is led through seven gates at

each of which one of her seven objects of clothing or adornment is re-

moved until she is rendered naked. Evidently the rules of the under-

world permitted no one to approach Ereshkigal, her sister and the ruler

of the underworld, except in that condition.

According to S. (164) the goddess is slain before the Anunnaki, the

seven judges, as Ereshkigal fastened her eye upon her sister. The corpsewas then hung on a nail. A. (69-75) speaks of Namtar attacking Ishtar

with his 60 maladies. Upon the death of the goddess all reproduction

4 A. Falkenstein, "Zu 'Inannas Gang zur Unterwelt," Archiv iir Orientforschung,14 (1942), pp. 113-38; Maurus Witzel, "Zur sumerischenRezension der H6llenfahrt

Ischtars," Orientalia,14 (1945), pp. 24-69; and "Ischtar gegen Tammuz?"Orientalia,21 (1952), pp. 435-55.

286



YAMAUCHI: TAMMUZAND THE BIBLE

ceased among men and beasts, according to A. (77-79). In S. the godEnki creates two sexless creatures, the kurgarru and the kalaturru, to

whom he entrusts "the food of life" and "the water of life." Afterrefusing to be bribed by gifts, they succeed in reviving the goddess by

sprinkling her with the elements of life. In A. the god Ea creates a

eunuch, Asushunamir - "His Appearance is Brilliant" - who evidentlydazzles Ereshkigal.

Once brought back to life again, the goddess' troubles were not yetover. She still had to get a substitute to take her place in the under-

world. This is clearly stated in A. (46), "If she does not give thee her

ransom price, bring her back." This fact is obscured by the translation

of S. in Kramer's edition in ANET, but is clarified in his edition in

JCS, 1951. Compare the two renderings of lines 275-77:

ANET JCS

Who now of the dwellers of the Who of those who have descended

nether world will descend peace- to the nether world (ever)ascended

fully to the nether world! When unharmed from the nether world!

Inanna ascends from the nether If Inanna would ascend from the

world, verily the dead hasten nether world, let her give oneahead of her. substitute as her substitute.

The new translation is supported by the Yale tablet of 91 lines,31 of which are new, which Kramer published in JCS, 4 (1950),

pp. 199-214. This relates how Inanna is accompanied in her search

for a suitable substitute by a company of ghoulish demons, small and

large, who are very eager to do their duty. In fact, they almost drag

off Ninshubur, Inanna's faithful minister, before she intervenes.Like-

wise they want to take away her barber Shara, but she intercedes for

him. They come to Kullab where she finds that her husband Dumuzi,

instead of mourning her absence, had "dressed himself in a noble gar-

ment, seated himself nobly on (his) seat." In a fury, Inanna "fastened

the eye upon him, the eye of death," and says, "As for him, carry him

off." In desperation Dumuzi asks Inanna's brother Utu to change him

into a snake that he may escape.At this exciting juncture the available tablets had broken off; in

1960 the new poem, "The Death of Dumuzi," clearly revealed the tragicend. This myth shows that Dumuzi had premonitions of his death,

through dreams which his sister Geshtinanna interpreted for him. He

attempts to hide among the plants, and then begs Utu to turn him into

a gazelle that he may escape the galla demons who are pursuing him.

He eludes them once and then escapes a second time to his sister, Belili.

The third time five demons catch up with him as he comes to the

287




sheepfold of Geshtinanna. The demons enter one after the other. One

"strikes Dumuzi on the cheek with a piercing nail," and another "strikes

Dumuzi on the cheek with the shepherd's crook."The holy churn lies (shattered),no milk is poured,The cup lies (shattered), Dumuzi lives no more,The sheepfoldis given to the wind.

Thus the new texts show us that there is no question of a resurrection.

The death of Dumuzi was a tragic but a necessary conclusion to the

story. He died and had to remain dead as Inanna's substitute in the

underworld.

It should be noted here that the conclusion to the Akkadian version

is not clear. The last twelve lines have usually been taken as an indica-

tion of the resurrection of Tammuz. The first four lines speak of the

funeral of Tammuz. The next four lines are about Belili, known in

Sumerian as Dumuzi's sister, Geshtinanna. The last four lines conclude:

My only brother,bring no harm to me!

On the day when Tammuzcomes up to me,When with him the lapis flute (and) the carnelianring come up to me,

When with him the wailing men and the wailingwomencome up to me,

May the dead rise and smell the incense.

O. R. Gurney points out that the verb in the second line above, el-la-an-ni

("comes up to me"), should not be weakened by translating it "greetsme" or "welcomes me" as it is related to the verb li-lu-nim-ma ("rise")which occurs in the last line.1s Gurney takes this then as a reference

to a resurrection. However, he believes that it is a late Assyrian addi-

tion, which has replaced the original ending of the poem.I would suggest that this is not a case of a real resurrection but that

it falls into the category of the ascent of spirits to smell the burning

incense and to partake of the offerings made for the dead. Neglectedand famished spirits rose and fed on the garbage thrown into the streets.'6

Moreover, ghosts whose funerary offerings were neglected tormented

their negligent relatives. This would seem to be the point of the line,

"My only brother, bring no harm to me!" All of the concluding lines

include elements associated with such mortuary services: "the lapis

flute," "the wailing men and the wailing women," and "the incense."

To propitiate such vengeful ghosts it was necessary for the bereaved to

offer food, perform rituals, and recite incantations. The following lines

taken from incantations against "appearing dead ghosts" illustrate this:

If to a man dead (ghost)s appear, to drive them away munduwater, water

of the river, water of the well, water of the ditch ... vinegar into beer you shall

ISO. R. Gurney, "Tammuz Reconsidered,"JSS, 7 (1962), p. 5.'6 AlexanderHeidel, TheGilgameshEpic and Old TestamentParallels, (1949), p. 207.

288



YAMAUCHI: TAMMUZAND THE BIBLE

mix, a pursitu vessel you shall fill, flour of bitter corn, ashes, roasted corn mix;the sick man shall pick it up, before Shamashhold it, thus say:

Incantation. Dead(ghost)s,

which I know, dead(ghost)s

in number which

I do not know... [who]appear to me, this be [your]food, [be]your loaf, be yourdrink.

Shamash, the (dead) ghosts which have set themselves on me, are appearingto me; be it the ghost of my father and my mother, or the ghost of my brother

and my sister, this may they accept from me, and set me free.17

Conclusions

As we look back on the history of the interpretation of the Tammuz

cycle, we find a few scholars who were suspicious about the allegedresurrection of Tammuz. Writing back in 1911, Lewis Farnell was aware

that the identification of Adonis with Tammuz was a tenuous one.

Farnell wrote: "But such a reconstruction of the old Tammuz ritual

rests at present only on indirect evidence of the later records of Attis-

Adonis cult(s) and of the Tammuz-worship among the heathen Syriansof Harran in the tenth century of our era."'8

Cyrus Gordon in denying that Baal was an annually dying fertility

god after the model of Adonis wrote: "Tammuz is said to die and revive

annually: a generally accepted idea for which I can find no support inthe Mesopotamian mythological texts."19 W. F. Albright in a recent

book review remarked in passing, "There is no concrete evidence for

details of the alleged Tammuz cult."20 Kramer in an article, "Sumerian

Mythology," in the Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society,

(1944), p. 13, had said: "Only the Tammuz myths dealing with the

dying deity and his resurrection will be omitted; the contents are still

too obscure for reasonably safe interpretation." He then made a predic-tion which he was to fulfill sixteen years later: "It is not too much to

hope, however, that some day in the not too distant future the pieceson which the conclusion of the story (of Inanna's Descent) is inscribed

will be discovered and deciphered."

By and large, however, it is sobering to note that the resurrection

of Tammuz was widely accepted for the last fifty years, and was made

the basis of numerous comparisons with the Bible, as we have seen

from the examples cited earlier in this paper. This was done in spite of

the fact that the resurrection of Tammuz was based, in the words of

Kramer, "onnothing

but inference and surmise,guess

and conjecture."21

17G. Castellino, "Rituals and Prayers against 'Appearing Ghosts,'" Orientalia,24 (1955), pp. 265, 267.

18 Lewis R. Farnell, Greece nd Babylon, p. 242.

I9 Cyrus H. Gordon, UgariticLiterature,p. 4.20 W. F. Albright in a review of E. O. James, The Cultof the MotherGoddessn the

ClassicalWorld,53 (1960), p. 287.2 S. N. Kramer,ed. Mythologiesof the Ancient World,p. 10.

289




What are the consequences for biblical studies and for comparative

religions of this new development? In the first place, it is clear that the

identification of Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and Baal as expressionsof the same type of a rising and dying fertility god must be abandoned.

Furthermore, P. Lambrechts has shown recently that the belief in the

resurrection of Adonis and in the resurrection of Attis was a late develop-ment. In the case of Adonis, the beautiful youth beloved of Aphrodite,who was slain by a boar, Lambrechts points out that there is no trace

of a resurrection in the pictorial representations of Adonis or in the

early texts - Sappho, Aristophanes, Plutarch, Pausanias, Theocritus.22

The four texts which speak of his resurrection - Lucian, Origen, Jerome,

and Cyril of Alexandria - are late, from the 2nd to 4th centuries A.D.

Attis, the consort of Cybele, does not appear as a god either in iconog-

raphy or in texts before A.D. 150.23 As for Haupt's interpretation of

Marduk's resurrection, W. von Soden has recently shown that the

document on which he based his theory has nothing to do with either

the death or the resurrection of Marduk.24

In the second place, biblical studies which assumed the traditional

view of Tammuz's resurrection - such as Theophile Meek's interpreta-tion of Canticles -will need to be drastically revised. Kramer, for

example, has done this in his article, "The Biblical 'Song of Songs' and

the Sumerian Love Songs," Expedition, 5 (1962), pp. 25-31, in which

he eliminates all references to a "coming up from the underworld."

Finally, Tammuz can no longer be considered a prototype of Christ.

Moreover, the resurrection of Inanna-Ishtar offers a contrast and not a

comparison. Whereas, according to Christian theology, Christ died as

a substitute for man so that he could take him to heaven, Ishtar died

and needed a substitute so that she herself could get back to heaven.

Inanna,instead of

rescuingTammuz from

hell,sent him there.

22 Pierre Lambrechts, "La 'resurrection' d'Adonis," in Melanges Isidore Levy,

(1955), pp. 207-40.23 Pierre Lambrechts, "Les fetes 'phrygiennes'de Cybele et d'Attis," Bulletin de

l'Institut HistoriqueBelgede Rome,27 (1952), pp. 141-70.24 W. von Soden, "Gibt es ein Zeugnis dafiir, dass die Babylonier an die Wieder-

aufstehung Marduks glaubten?" ZA, 17 (1955), pp. 130-66.

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Tammuz and the Bible