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:
Tigay argues for an interpretation . . . wherein totafot is a headband, and suggests that the use of the word is as much metaphorical as it is literal. Tigay explains the probable source of the word’s root meaning (“something that encircles”), illustrates how its use in Exodus could be understood metaphorically (i.e., “something one holds close”), and points out that contemporaneous Egyptian and Assyrian art from the 8th century BCE shows the wearing of headbands to be typical of peoples (e.g., the Israelites) living in the region northeast of Egypt.
In discussing the earliest translations of totafot, Tigay notes that it is almost always used in reference to something that “completely encircles the part of the body on which it is worn.”
We are thus left with a way of understanding totafot as an ordinary word, as Rabbi Moses Naḥmanides [1194–1270] would have it, neither borrowed from Egyptian, Coptic, or Phrygian [as one talmudic opinion suggests], nor connected to other cultures’ magic rituals for dispelling evil, [as some modern scholars have asserted]. And rather than involving some mysterious allusion to the construction of the head t’filin, its meaning is a straightforward metaphor reminding us how important it is to keep the teachings close to us and foremost in our minds.
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/tale-of-two-totafot