Note 13 — Chapter III · ROOTS OF THE MYTH

Among the common cravings of the age was the need for a near God,13 one ostensibly more in touch with human sorrows and sufferings than the remote Supreme God. For the earlier Hebrews, Yahweh was a tribal God like Moloch or Chemosh, fighting for his people (when they deserved it) like other tribal Gods; a magnified man who talked familiarly with Abraham and Sarah, and wrestled with Jacob.14 Even then, the attractions of other cults set up constant resort to them by many Yahwists, unless the historical Sacred Books are as illusory upon this as upon other topics. To say nothing of the continual charges against Jewish kings, from Solomon downwards, of setting up alien worships, and the express assertion of Jeremiah15 that in Judah there were as many Gods as cities, and in Jerusalem as many Baal altars as streets, we have the equally explicit assertion in Ezekiel16 that “women weeping for Tammuz” were to be seen in or at the Temple itself. Now, Tammuz was a Semitic deity, borrowed, it would seem, from the Akkadians,17 an original or variant of Adonis, the very type of the Saviour-God we are now tracing. Tammuz, like Jesus, was “the only-begotten son.” If it be argued that the worship of Tammuz must have disappeared during or after the Exile, since it would not be tolerated in the Second Temple, the answer is that Saint Jerome expressly declares that in his day the pagans celebrated the worship of Tammuz at the very cave in which Jesus was said to have been born at Bethlehem18—a detail of some significance in our inquiry. Tammuz = Adonis = “the Lord.” That worship, indeed, might conceivably be a revival occurring after the fall of Jerusalem; but to say that there can have been no folklore about Tammuz in Jewry or Galilee or Samaria between the time of Ezekiel and that of Jerome would be to make an utterly unwarranted assertion. The belief may even have survived under another God-name.