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January 19, 2022

A Possible Solution to a 2,000-Year-Old Biblical Etymological Mystery

What exactly are totafot?

In the Hebrew Bible, the word totafot appears only three times, each in reference to t’filin or phylacteries—small boxes containing parchment with short passages from the Torah—that are to be worn on the head. The word’s literal meaning is obscure, and gave rise to various rabbinic etymologies. After discussing these in light of modern linguistic and ethnographic knowledge, Stanley Dubinsky and Hesh Epstein present an explanation provided by the contemporary biblical scholar Jeffrey Tigay:

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