Palestinian and Babylonian an Temples

With its prospect of a powerful and pan-Israelite kingdom, the monarchic option was purely utopian: effectively the royal house no longer had any momentum, an independent kingdom was incompatible with the imperial situation, and those who returned came only from Judah and Benjamin. At times, utopias win the day, but in this case the vision was retrograde and conservative, an attempt to return to a now obsolete past. It was defeated by another utopia, the priestly vision, projected into the future and pursued with great determination. In theory this envisaged God's direct sovereignty: Yahweh mālak, ‘God reigns’, as the Psalms say, once royal but now adapted to this new ideology:

However, in practice the kingdom of God should be created by giving priests a political role and organizing the Judean community as a temple-city – a totally innovative solution in the history of Palestine.

In Palestine, and throughout the Levant, temples had always played a strictly cultic role. ‘Houses’ of various city gods (hence conceived as their dwellings), these temples were quite small, with a simple architectural structure comprising a vestibule, a sanctuary and an inner sanctum.