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  • From: Harold Holmyard <hholmyard AT ont.com>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] "Desire of Women" in Heb. Text of Dan. 11:37
  • Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2006 09:46:07 -0600

Shoshanna Walker wrote:
It's not "the desire of women" - it's "The most desirable among women", and Daniel is referring to Israel


HH: It seems highly unlikely to me that Daniel is referring to Israel. The context indicates that it is some object of worship. I tend to favor the Tammuz interpretation, since that was a god worshiped by women in Babylon and also Israel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammuz


In Babylonia, the month Tammuz was established in honor of the eponymous god Tammuz, who originated as a Sumerian shepherd-god, Dumuzid or Dumuzi, the consort of Inanna and, in his Akkadian form, the parallel of Ishtar's consort. The Syrian Adonis ("lord"), who was drawn into the Greek pantheon, is another counterpart of Tammuz[1] son and consort. The name "Tammuz" seems to have been derived from the Akkadian form Tammuzi, based on early Sumerian Damu-zid. The later standard Sumerian form, Dumu-zid, in turn became Dumuzi in Akkadian.

Beginning with the summer solstice came a time of mourning in the Ancient Near East as in the Aegean: the Babylonians marked the decline in daylight hours and the onset of killing summer heat and drought with a six-day "funeral" for the god, which was observed even at the very door of the Temple in Jerusalem, to the horror of the reformer Ezekiel:

"Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz. Then said he unto to me, 'Hast thou seen this, O son of man? turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations than these." — Ezekiel 8.14-15

Dumuzid/Tammuz being the god of the vegetation cycle, this corresponds to the changing of the seasons as the abundance of the earth diminishes in his absence. He is a life-death-rebirth deity.

HH: Jessie Weston in "From Ritual to Romance," wrote in 1920:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/frr/frr07.htm

We know now that the cult of the god Tammuz, who, if not the direct original of the Phoenician-Greek Adonis, is at least representative of a common parent deity, may be traced back to 3000 B.C., while it persisted among the Sabeans at Harran into the Middle Ages.

HH: She writes about the Adonis cult:

The most noticeable feature of the ritual was the prominence assigned to women; "ce sont les femmes qui le pleurent, et qui l'accompagnent à sa tombe. Elles sanglotent éperdument pendant les nuits,--c'est leur dieu plus que tout autre, et seules elles veulent pleurer sa mort, et chanter sa résurrection 1."

[It is the women who weep over him, and who accompany him to his tomb. They sob desperately during the nights, -- it is their god more than any other, and they alone wish to weep over his death, and sing his resurrection.]

Thus in the tenth century the festival received the Arabic name of El-Bûgat, or 'The Festival of the Weeping Women 2.'

HH: The Book of Ezekiel suggests that similar things may have been true for the worship of Tammuz.

HH: Tammuz was apparently an important idol. Donald A. Mackenzie, Myths of Babylonia and Assyria (1915), wrote:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/mba/mba11.htm

AMONG the gods of Babylonia none achieved wider and more enduring fame than Tammuz, who was loved by Ishtar, the amorous Queen of Heaven--the beautiful youth who died and was mourned for and came to life again. He does not figure by his popular name in any of the city pantheons, but from the earliest times of which we have knowledge until the passing of Babylonian civilization, he played a prominent part in the religious life of the people.

Yours,
Harold Holmyard






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