From Mesopotamia, the theme of the dead Dumuzi and his resurrection
spread to Palestine, and it is not surprising to find the women of Jerusalem
bewailing Tammuz in one of the gates of the Jerusalem temple. Nor is it at all
improbable that the myth of Dumuzi's death and his resurrection left its mark
on the Christ story, in spite of the profound spiritual gulf between them.
Several motifs in the Christ story that may go back to Sumerian prototypes have
been known for some time: the resurrection of a deity after three days and
three nights in the Nether World; the notion of thirty shekels, the sum
received by Judas for betraying his master, as a term of contempt and disdain;
the epithets "shepherd," "anointed," and perhaps even
"carpenter"; the not unimportant fact that one of the gods with whom
Dumuzi came to be identified was Damu, "the physician," to whom his
mother Ninisinna, "the great physician of the black-heads," entrusted
the art of healing by exorcising demons. To all these can now be added the
torturing suffered by Dumuzi at the hands of the cruel galla,
reminiscent to some extent of the agony of Christ: he was bound and pinioned;
was forced to undress and run naked; was scourged and beaten. Above all, as we
now know, Dumuzi, not unlike Christ, played the role of vicarious substitute
for mankind; had he not taken the place of Inanna, the goddess of love,
procreation, and fertility, in the Nether World, all life on earth would have
come to an end. Admittedly the differences between the two were more marked and
significant than the resemblances-Dumuzi was no Messiah preaching the Kingdom
of God on earth. But the Christ story certainly did not originate and evolve in
a vacuum; it must have had its forerunners and prototypes, and one of the most
venerable and influential of these was no doubt the mournful tale of the shepherd-
god Dumuzi and his melancholy fate, a myth that had been current throughout the
ancient Near East for over two millennia. (Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sacred
Marriage Rite: Aspects of Faith, Myth, and Ritual in Ancient Sumer [Bloomington,
Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1969], 133)
