Exo 13:3:
Remember this day.
The Hebrew Zakhar suggests both the cognitive act of remembrance and the
ritual act of commemoration. This entire projection into the future in the promised
land of the Passover observance clearly duplicates some of the material in 12:14-28,
though it stresses even more centrally the function of memory/commemoration. (Robert
Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company,
2019], 1:265)
Exo 13:9:
a sign for you on your hand and a remembrance between your eyes. The concrete reference of these famous
words remains in doubt. The original intention could conceivably be
metaphorical: the story of the Exodus is to be forever present on the hand (or
arm), the idiomatic agent of power and action, and between the eyes, the place
of perception and observation. Here the key word for our passage, “remembrance”
(zikaron), is used for what should be between the eyes. In verse 16 the
term used is totafot, “circlets” or “frontlets,” a word of obscure
origin and not entirely certain meaning: many imagine it as a headband,
although a headband would be worn above, not between, the eyes, whereas there
are Egyptian ornaments, as some scholars have noted, that were worn between the
eyes. Subsequent Jewish tradition construed this phrase to enjoin the wearing
of small leather boxes containing scriptural passages written on parchment (tefillin,
conventionally translated as “phylacteries”). (Robert Alter, The
Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 1:266)
