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In his recent edition of these texts, A. R. George has suggested that it is not terribly difficult to surmise the purpose of the topographies.53 They were composed by Mesopotamian scholars to extol the religious and theological importance of Babylon's holy shrines and cities. In particular, the scribes wished to demonstrate that the religious heritage of Babylon surpassed that of older cities like Nippur. So it was in some measure a context of religious competition that prompted them to Tiffany Earring their detailed explanations of sacred space.

It is often commented that the Priestly tabernacle texts in Exodus are similarly painstaking in their detail.54 To be sure, these texts were influenced by descriptions of Solomon's temple in 1 Kings, and hence their peculiarities should not be attributed entirely to Mesopotamian influence. However, there are some significant differences between the Hebrew accounts of the tabernacle and temple. Not only is P's tabernacle account more detailed, but its function and purpose are different. Whereas the description of Solomon's temple accentuated the magnitude of the king's accomplishments, the Priestly Writer's purpose was more profound: to demonstrate jewelry on sale primordial nature of Jewish tradition by showing that God's dwelling place-the tabernacle-was constructed according to ancient blueprints from God.55 This is why the Priestly description of the tabernacle (Exodus 35-40), which is similar to Solomon's temple account in other respects, was preceded by God's prescriptions for the tabernacle's construction (Exodus 25-31).56 Prescriptions for the holy shrine do not appear in the narrative of temple construction in 1 Kings. It follows that the detail of the tabernacle account in Exodus and its emphasis on a divine blueprint find their closest parallels in the Mesopotamian rather than Israelite literary traditions.

To retrace our steps for a moment, it seems to me very likely Tiffany Bracelet the narrative location of P's tabernacle account, standing as it does after Yahweh's victory at Yam Suph, reflects the influence of Mesopotamia-especially from Enuma Elish. But was P's detailed presentation of the tabernacle's construction, with its emphasis on sacred "blueprints," inspired also by Mesopotamian tradition? My affirmative answer to this question cannot be so certain as in the cases of P's creation, rites of the Day of Atonement, and the narrative of the exodus. The notion that sacred space might have primordial origins, and that its design might be revealed by the gods, is too common in religion for us to isolate it to Mesopotamia and, through this, to the Priestly Writer.57 Nonetheless, it seems to me that the similarities between the Babylonian and Priestly prescriptions for holy things are more than fortuitous. Their common interest in the significance of prescription/execution patterns when defining and shaping sacred space is striking in a way that distinguishes them from earlier Israelite literature. Moreover, if we grant for the moment that P dates to or after the exilic era, as most scholars suppose, then my Tiffany bangle receives additional confirmation from other Hebrew authors. When the postexilic Chronicler re-narrated Solomon's construction of the temple in 1 Chronicles 28, among the many things that he added to his Deuteronomistic Vorlage was the claim that David recorded the pattern for Solomon's temple by "writing from the hand of the Lord ... all the work to be done according to the plan." Similarly, in Ezekiel's temple vision we find that God provided elaborate temple plans to the prophet through a vision.58 Also in Ezra, the author was careful to relate that cultic restoration was undertaken according to the prescriptions "written in the Book of Moses" (Ezra 3:2; 6:18). So it is not only in P but in exilic and postexilic Judaism generally that we find an emphasis on divinely given plans for sacred space.

The argument for Mesopotamian influence on P's tabernacle account is in part circumstantial and contextual and in Tiffany CuffLink derived from both general and detailed comparative evidence. An additional piece of evidence would be the potential motive of P's work. If the Priestly Writer has shaped his tabernacle account to follow the contours of Mesopotamian ritual prescriptions and theological texts, why did he do so? One clue is provided by the Babylonian topographies themselves. As George has pointed out, an important motive for their composition was undoubtedly to enhance Babylon's identity in comparison with the older, classical identities of cities like Nippur. To my mind this was also the motive at work in P, who wished to provide Judaism's sacred site with the same primordial origins that prominent Mesopotamian temples claimed for their own cults. In doing so, the Priestly Writer enhanced his community's identity by presenting Jewish culture as comparable to the classical culture of Mesopotamia-as Babylon trumped Nippur, so P trumped Babylon.59