Ezekiel 8:14

Verse Ezekiel 8:14. There sat women weeping for Tammuz.] This was Adonis, as we have already seen; and so the Vulgate here translates. My old MS. Bible reads, There saten women, mornynge a mawmete of lecherye that is cleped Adonydes. He is fabled to have been a beautiful youth beloved by Venus, and killed by a wild boar in Mount Lebanon, whence springs the river Adonis, which was fabled to run blood at his festival in August. The women of Phoenicia, Assyria, and Judea worshipped him as dead, with deep lamentation, wearing priapi and other obscene images all the while, and they prostituted themselves in honour of this idol. Having for some time mourned him as dead, they then supposed him revivified and broke out into the most extravagant rejoicings. Of the appearance of the river at this season, Mr. Maundrell thus speaks: "We had the good fortune to see what is the foundation of the opinion which Lucian relates, viz., that this stream at certain seasons of the year, especially about the feast of Adonis, is of a bloody colour, proceeding from a kind of sympathy, as the heathens imagined, for the death of Adonis, who was killed by a wild boar in the mountain out of which this stream issues. Something like this we saw actually come to pass, for the water was stained to a surprising redness; and, as we observed in travelling, had stained the sea a great way into a reddish hue." This was no doubt occasioned by a red ochre, over which the river ran with violence at this time of its increase. Milton works all this up in these fine lines: -

"Thammuz came next behind,

Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured

The Syrian damsels to lament his fate,

In amorous ditties all a summer's day;

While smooth Adonis, from his native rock,

Ran purple to the sea, suffused with blood

Of Thammuz, yearly wounded. The love tale

Infected Sion's daughters with like heat:

Whose wanton passions in the sacred porch

Ezekiel saw, when by the vision led,

His eye surveyed the dark idolatries

Of alienated Judah."

Par. Lost, b. i. 446.

Tammuz signifies hidden or obscure, and hence the worship of his image was in some secret place.