Just one last comment for the overall setting since we are considering details of pagan vs orthodox Jewish issues. Since there was no image in the Melqart temple, I would consider the history for Canaan that Melchizedek, king of Salem was an orthodox Yawist, whom Solomon paid tribute to. So Yahweh or the concept of Yaweh was in practice at one time among the Canaanites. The Jews used to "punish" them could have been in relation to them once being "true worshipers" who then corrupted that form of worship. So some of what became what we call "pagan" may be a corruption of some form of earlier Melchizedekian style Yawism and thus some similiarities in some foreign/pagan temples could have had a basis in the actual earlier orthodox design. That is, paganism corrupted the idea of the "holy of holies" from its original reference to heaven by making a competitive parallel concept of the birth canal of the mother goddess. Worshipers of the mother Goddess created "grooves" with trees or used natural grooves/crevices to imitate the vulva and vagina of the mother goddess into which the worshipers would worship. Later concepts of the "Divine Feminine" thus associate sex with the worship.
So there would be the question as to whether the original concept of the "holy of holies" was based in earlier Yawist concepts and then corrupted by paganism, essentially addressing that even the original stories of Eden or the concept of the global flood have a common origin and we see just various distortions through time of those original stories. So I thought it was interesting the two temples emphasized these two massive pillars, which I can only assume related to the two covering cherubs, who certainly could be seen as foundations of the temple or gateways to the temple, the two covering cherubs and the Ark forming a divine "trinity" relationship; originally, Michael, Satan and Yaweh, which under Christology becomes Jehovah, Christ and the Church, the Church replacing Satan as Christ's Bride. So there are a lot of open possibilities of interpretation here, besides the tendency to presume some Jewish customs are loosely or directly based on concepts borrowed from the Canaanites as some have expressed. It's a circle. How much did Melchizedek influence pagan Canaanite culture and how much did pagan Canaanite Culture later influence the Jews?
JC