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 he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house ... toward the north. From the secret abominations of the chambers of imagery, the prophet's eye is turned to the outer court at the north door; within the outer court women were not admitted, but only to the door.
Behold, there sat women - the attitude of mourners (Job 2:13; Isaiah 3:26).
Tammuz - [perhaps contracted for Tamªzuwz, from a Hebrew root, 'to melt down;' taamaaz the same as maacac (H4549), referring to the river Adonis, fed by, the melted snows of Lebanon, as also to the sun's decreasing heat in winter, and to the melting lamentations of Venus for Adonis]. Instead of weeping for the national sins, they wept for the idol. Tammuz (the Syriac for Adonis, according to Jerome), the paramour of Venus-and of the same name as the river flowing from Lebanon-killed by a wild boar, and, according to the fable, permitted to spend half the year on earth, and obliged to spend the other half in the lower world. An annual feast was celebrated to him in June (hence called Tammuz in the Jewish calendar) at Byblos, when the Syrian women, in wild grief, tore off their hair, and yielded their persons to prostitution, consecrating the hire of their infamy to Venus; next followed days of rejoicing far his return to the earth-the former feast being called 'the disappearance of Adonis,' the latter, 'the finding of Adonis.' This Phoenician feast answered to the similar Egyptian one in hononr of Osiris. The idea thus fabled was that of the waters of the river and the beauties of spring destroyed by the summer heat; or else the earth being clothed with beauty during the half year when the sun is in the upper hemisphere, and losing it when he departs to the lower. The name Adonis is not here used, as Adon is the appropriated title of Yahweh.