Tammuz

Tammuz is the fourth month of the Hebrew year, falling in summer, roughly June to July, and aligned in tradition with the sign of Cancer. It counts twenty-nine days. The seventeenth of Tammuz is a fast day commemorating the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem, and it opens the sombre three-week period leading to the ninth of Av, a time of mourning for the destruction of the Temple. The month takes its name from an ancient Mesopotamian deity, Tammuz, the name adopted along with the other month names during the Babylonian exile. The Hebrew calendar is lunisolar, its months following the moon while an added leap month keeps them in their seasons. These are the observances of the Jewish calendar tradition, in which Tammuz begins the summer season of mourning over the loss of the Temple.

Tammuz takes its name from a Mesopotamian deity associated with vegetation and the agricultural cycle, mourned in ancient Babylonian religion for his death and descent to the underworld each year, a name the Hebrew calendar absorbed as a calendar month during the Babylonian exile without adopting the deity himself; the prophet Ezekiel, writing during that same exile, explicitly condemns women he saw "weeping for Tammuz" at the Temple in Jerusalem as an act of idolatry, one of the few places the Hebrew Bible names the deity directly. The seventeenth of Tammuz is itself a minor fast day, traditionally marking the breaching of Jerusalem's walls before the Temple's destruction, and opens the three-week mourning period that culminates in Tisha B'Av the following month.

The name comes from the Akkadian Duzu, one of the Babylonian month names adopted wholesale into Hebrew usage. The month runs a fixed 29 days in every year.

The month names are Babylonian. Twelve of them are the Akkadian month names taken into Hebrew during and after the exile, and the biblical books of the return use them freely while the earlier books generally number the months or use a small set of older Canaanite names. The atlas records the borrowing rather than presenting the names as native, because it is one of the clearest visible marks the exile left on Jewish practice.

The Jewish calendar as now kept is calculated rather than observed. Month lengths are fixed by rule except for Cheshvan and Kislev, which absorb the adjustment and may run 29 or 30 days, and a thirteenth month is added in seven years out of nineteen on a fixed cycle so that Passover stays in the spring. A further set of rules, the postponements, shifts Rosh Hashanah off certain weekdays, which is why the year has six possible lengths rather than two.

Tammuz is named for a Mesopotamian deity, Dumuzi, and the name is used in the Hebrew Bible in exactly that sense: the book of Ezekiel describes women weeping for Tammuz at the gate of the Temple. A month of the Jewish calendar therefore carries the name of a foreign god, which is a striking consequence of the wholesale adoption of the Babylonian month names.