In the Hebrew Bible, there are a remarkable number of texts dealing with temple building, temple furnishing and temple ritual. One would think that with the staggering amount of detailed descriptions offered in these texts a reconstruction of Hebrew Bible temples and ritual should be fairly straightforward. But, as it has often been pointed out, in spite of their wealth of information these texts cannot serve as handbooks for priests or stonemasons. If the lengthy temple texts are not manuals and inventories then what are they and what purpose do they serve?
In this paper, I shall attempt to find a solution to these questions by comparing Hebrew Bible temple texts with other ANE temple texts and by reading the Hebrew Bible temple texts through the lens of cultural memory studies.