Before the tabernacle

Lisbeth Fried has thoughts on the P/J strata in Genesis. She notes that J assumes a sacrificial faith, going back to Cain and Abel; where P assumes a Near Eastern sacrificial religion (sometimes called "cult") which demands a Temple.

What about before the Temple exists? J says - any man whom God blesses can do sacrifice, at any place, as long as the man sets up an altar. P says - Tabernacle, around the Ark. J would ask - what about before the Ark; to which P basically shrugs.

Fried figures that J relies upon... the Javanim. The Greeks left some record of sacrifice without a Temple. Sure; Fried knows that the Greeks often built their own temples. (And they did it early: Mycenaean shrines are noted in Pylos' Linear B, Room 18 at Mycenae proper is usually considered such a shrine, and so on.) But for the Greeks, shrines were like telephone-booths; the god might attend upon the shrine, but his home was elsewhere - like Mount Olympus. As far as Fried knows, the Greeks are the only people who did this in antiquity (excepting animists whose dieties were nonuniversal river-spirits); so Fried assumes that's that.

To me, sacrifice without Temple looks basal Indo-European. Therefore I wouldn't, to explain J, demand Hellenic influence.

Maybe certain Hurrian "Horites" were known to set up altars without a temple, on campaign, which practice was noted in Israel. Or the Cimmerians, or the true Ashkenaz - "Scythians", to Greeks. Any trader from the Near East who'd traveled far enough would observe "primitive tribes" doing that, and extrapolate therefrom that the Semites too might have behaved like this in their deep past.