Two Temples

Lisbeth Fried discusses two temple plans: one Near Eastern, one Greek. In the Near East, a temple is where the god makes his real home on Earth. This is somewhat the theory behind the Christian martyrion, or merthyr in Welsh. Most Greeks, instead, understood the gods to live in Olympus. Men communicated with those gods via altars in the open. It follows up this piece.

Fried sees the Deuteronomy-based literature and the Holiness Code, and Priestly literature generally, to be classically Near Eastern. If there wasn't a Temple, at least there could be a tent with the Ark set up in the place of glory. This is the tabernacle.

Fried distinguishes between the Deuteronomic / Holiness view; and 1-6 Ezra. Fried thinks 1-6 Ezra / 1 Esdras was Hellenistic. Ezra 3:6 has that Zerubbabel on return to Zion built an altar but did not (re)build the Temple. Supposedly Zerubbabel was a Babylonian who should have just got to building.

I've already asked if the Greek way - permanent altars, with temples as afterthought - be (east)IndoEuropean. Although this might exclude the Persian (and Avestan) respect for fire thus refusal of holocaust.

Either way, it's postExilic. Fried points out the innumerable tales in our Torah where some patriarch sets up an altar and not a temple. These are typically allotted to "J", or maybe sometimes "E". Most would say that this was a means for the Temple societies of king Josiah and certain stray northerners to claim the land but not yet the temples, which temples were inaugurated by the post-Torah kingdoms. Fried thinks that the means which the Torah chooses to lay this claim, be Greek like Ezra (or at least not Semitic).

I get the impression that Arabs, also, preferred the outdoor altar - at first. But then our records cluster around Nabataea, and surrounding Safa and Hisma (once Moab and Edom). The Nabat was quite Hellenised, by the time those Arabs' ancestors trickled through aforementioned Moab and Edom. Not for them, the reactionary record-keeping of the Jews and Samaritans.