Ezekiel 8:17
Ezekiel 8:1717“Son of man,” He said to me, “do you see this? Is it not enough for the house of Judah to commit the abominations they are practicing here, that they must also fill the land with violence and continually provoke Me to anger? Look, they are even putting the branch to their nose!
Watchtower literature occasionally cites — "they are putting the branch to their nose" — as evidence that the cross is a phallic sun-worship symbol with pre-Christian pagan roots. The reading is traceable through H. Cutner's 1940 A Short History of Sex-Worship (a Rationalist Press Association freethought pamphlet) back to Alexander Hislop's 1853 The Two Babylons — a source publicly retracted by its biggest Evangelical popularizer Ralph Woodrow in 1997 after he checked Hislop against primary sources.
The Hebrew word Ezekiel uses, zemorah, means "branch" or "vine-shoot" and is used elsewhere in the Old Testament without any sexual overtones — (grape cluster branches from Eshcol), (cuttings), (vine branches). The NWT's own footnote at flags that the original reading was "my nose" rather than "their nose," a scribal correction called the Emendations of the Sopherim, which indicates this was a Hebrew idiom for insulting Jehovah, not a phallic rite. Daniel Block's NICOT Ezekiel commentary (Eerdmans 1997) surveys the options and concludes the verse is either a sun-worship gesture (consistent with verse 16, where worshippers face east toward the rising sun) or a rude provocation idiom directed at Jehovah — neither connected to the cross. The phallic-cross genealogy has no standing in contemporary Semitics or Egyptology; it is Hislop restated with different flavouring.