Commenting on temples and other cultic sites outside of Jerusalem, including that of Elephantine (see Jeff Lindsay’s discussion here), Jarl E. Fossum, retired professor of New Testament at the University of Michigan, wrote the following:
It has become increasingly clear that the Deuteronomic requirement that God should be worshipped in only one place was not recognized at once and by all. There were post-Deuteronomic temples of Jews in Egypt, both in Elephantine and Leontopolis, and possibly also in Transjordan and Babylonia. For the possible existence of a Jewish temple at the Transjordanian centre of the Tobiads, see A. Spiro, “Samaritans, Tobiads, and Judahites in Pseudo-Philo”, PAAJR, 20, 1951, pp. 314 f.; cp. P.W. Lapp, “The Second and Third Campaigns at ‘Araq-el-‘Emir”, BASOR, 171, 1963, pp. 8 ff For the possible existence of a Jewish temple in Babylonia, see L.E. Browne, “A Jewish Sanctuary in Babylonia,” JTS, 17, 1916, pp. 400 ff.; cp. Early Judaism, Cambridge, 1929, pp. 53 ff. See also Cross, Jr., “Aspects”, p. 208; Coggins, pp. 101 f., 112 f. Regarding the Elephantine colonists, the epistolary intercourse between these immigrants and the authorities in Jerusalem shows that the former were not regarded as schismatics. Rowley, “Sanballat”, p. 188 (= Men of God, p. 268), does not think that the Jerusalem authorities would have found the building of the Samaritan temple so unacceptable, since they would not like to have Northerners worshipping in Jerusalem. (Jarl E. Fossum, The Name of God and the Angel of the Lord: Samaritan and Jewish Concepts of Intermediation and the Origin of Gnosticism [Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1985; repr., Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2017], 37 n. 27, emphasis added)
