Sepulchrave II
Legend
This guy, makes it extremely clear, in quite amusing way why Paizo dropping this word from D&D really doesn’t improve the overall happiness in the world. Only a minute long but makes the point far more eloquently than I can.
In essence (for those who can’t abide videos in forums) the speaker (Jeremy Shuback, a Jewish animator exploring Judaism) says that Tefillin are Tefillin. The internet and the dictionary seems to suggest to the world that Tefillin are also called phylacteries but he makes it clear that no one who was ever actually wearing a Tefillin would ever call it a phylactery. There aren’t two equally good words for the object, they’re just called Tefillin so stop calling them phylacteries.
Yehudah Cohn is a research associate at NYU who based his work on his Oxford doctoral thesis and who specializes in the early development of Jewish ritual practice and its connection to Graeco-Roman magic. He explains why the relationship between the words tefillin and phylactery is more complicated than it appears at first blush - it's not a case of simple translation.
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