Tammuz, the Month of the Breached Walls

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.