building always ushers in an age of peace and tranquillity. Because the temple was in microcosm what the world was in macrocosm, ancient Near Eastern texts are quite happy to compare the erection of a temple to the act of creating the world. Some scholars have reconstructed an earlier form of P that would make the biblical tale look very much like these ancient Near Eastern models. Moses received a divine blueprint of the tabernacle and its founding rites (Exod. 25–31), which he then put in place