Ezekiel8chapter 8

The scene begins with a detail that is easy to skip: the elders of Judah were sitting in his house. The exiles had kept their own leadership structure, and a prophet's house functioned as a place where people came to ask. That is why the shock lands with witnesses in the room.

What he is shown in the temple is a tour of four courtyards, each worse than the last. First, an image at the north gate that provoked God's jealousy — most likely a carved Asherah image of the kind Manasseh had once set inside the house itself. Second, seventy elders in a hidden room, each with a censer, the walls carved with crawling things and beasts — animal imagery of the sort Egyptian religion was famous for, being burned to in the dark by the men who governed the city.

Third, women weeping for Tammuz at the north gate. Tammuz, called Dumuzi in Sumerian, was the shepherd-god of Mesopotamian myth who died and went down to the underworld; his death was mourned with ritual wailing every year, and one of the Babylonian months carried his name. Judean women were keeping a Babylonian mourning rite in the courts of the LORD.

Fourth, twenty-five men between the porch and the altar — the holiest ground a non-priest could stand on — with their backs to the sanctuary and their faces east, bowing to the sunrise. Sun worship had a foothold in Judah before this; Josiah had removed horses and chariots dedicated to the sun from the temple entrance. Turning your back on the house to face the sun is a posture, and Ezekiel reports it as one.