If the tabernacle was patterned after the Garden, either such knowledge was passed down orally through the generations until the tabernacle was built, which seems impossible since the first mention of worship of Yahweh comes within the genealogy of Gen. 4, or God dictated it directly to the author. I’m not a fan of the dictation model of inspiration.
Have to disagree, though I note you’re also citing a previous cultural pattern as a model for the tabernacle.
Anyway, if the tabernacle (and later temple) was patterned after a war command tent, that makes God a god of war, not the God of peace who condemned Noah’s generation because they “filled the earth with violence” or God the Father of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace.
Sumerian and Babylonian cultural influences are much more likely than Egyptian. Ancient Israel prior to the invention of alphabetic writing is filled with cuneiform clay fragments, while hieroglyphics are scarce to non-existent. The situation remained the same until Cyrus defeated Babylon for good and established his own alphabetic writing as the lingua franca of the empire. Cuneiform quickly fades away and the old Babylonian myths that Genesis 1-11 argued against likewise fade from memory.
As one example of Babylonian influence, here’s this:
Peter James and Marinus Anthony van der Sluijs, “Ziggurats, Colors, and Planets: Rawlinson Revisited,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 60, no. (2008): 57-79.
from the ziggurat at Ur. In its original form, as constructed by Ur-Namma and his son Shulgi (ca. 2100–2050 BC) of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the tower consisted of four stages. According to its excavator, Sir Leonard Woolley, the Neo-Babylonian king Nabonidus (555–539 BC) expanded the building into seven stages, leaving only the first level of the original intact (1925: 219; 1939: 135–43). …
In addition, a considerable body of literary and pictorial evidence documents the concept of a ziggurat with seven stages: 1. The so-called E-sangil tablet from Uruk (AO 6555) … sets out the dimensions of the temple tower Etemenanki (é . t e m e n . a n . k i) of the Esagila complex in Babylon, which was completed by Nebuchadnezzar II. Seven stages are described, with their respective dimensions (AO 6555 ll. 36–42). The height of the structure is equal to the base …
*A Late Babylonian tablet from Babylon (BM 38217; Wiseman 1972; 1991: 71; Allinger-Csollich 1998: 316–19) depicts the six lowest stages of a ziggurat. Wiseman showed that the top of the tablet, broken off, most likely showed a seventh level whose dimensions formed a cube
The cumulative effect of this evidence is difficult to brush aside.*
George, A. R. “The Tower of Babel: Archaeology, History and Cuneiform Texts.” Archiv Für Orientforschung 51 (2005): 75-95. Accessed February 26, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/41670231.
The decipherment of the E-sangil Tablet confirmed most commentators in the view that the mythical Tower of Babel was a memory of a real building, a staged temple-tower that the Babylonians knew by the Sumerian ceremonial name of E-temen-anki ‘House of the Foundation Platform of Heaven and Underworld’ …
The text may have come to have other significance. Glassner (2002) has found in it a more profound purpose, observing a cosmological allusion in the matching size of the ziqqurrat and the ark of ‡ta-napi·ti in SB Gilgamesh XI, both having bases of one ikû and both subdivided on the vertical plane into seven storeys. As he notes, the ikû is also the key dimension in the first section of the E-sangil Tablet, being the notional area of the Grand Court (kisalma¿). But there is more to it than that, for the ikû was also held to be visible in the night sky, where it was the great square of Pegasus, the celestial counterpart of both E-sangil and Babylon (George 1992: 244). …
The newly published manuscript from Babylon helps to correct false understandings that derive from Anu-b∂l·unu’s copy in the section on the nu¿ar, the temple that crowned the ziqqurrat (§6; for details see George 1992: 428-9). Other documentary evidence published at the same time can be brought to bear on the temple. Schmid’s architectural reconstruction of the tower is broadly conventional, with the temple building sitting on the terrace of the sixth stage and thereby forming its seventh stage (Schmid 1995: pls. 40-2). Schmid’s temple has four exterior gates, one in each façade. This lay-out reflects the wording of Nebuchadnezzar II’s cliff inscriptions at Wadi Brisa …
So to sum up: The ziggurat was crowned by a temple in the shape of a cube; the ziggurat’s dimensions reflected the “ark” in the epic of Gilgamesh; there were four entrances to the temple complex facing the four compass points; the ziggurat represented the foundations of heaven and earth. Any of that sound familiar?
The cherry on top is that Nebuchadnezzar II completed the restoration of E-temen-anki in Babylon just about the same time that he destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, and his son and successor Nabonidus was busy restoring the original ziggurat in Ur when Cyrus invaded and took Babylon with hardly a scratch.