Tangled Up in Text leads the reader conversant in the Hebrew Bible, the Second Temple period, and tannaitic sources through a careful examination of literary and archeological evidence pertaining to the ritual practice of tefillin. The ritual of wearing leather boxes containing discrete verses from the Torah on the hand/arm and head/forehead remains ubiquitous among halakhically observant men down to today, but according to Yehudah B. Cohn, the origins and original meanings of the ritual have been unsatisfactorily articulated until the present study. As a corrective to the tendency “to take much of the development of tefillin practice as a given” (15), Cohn's work attempts to ascertain how and when the practice of tefillin developed, particularly in relation to the Greco-Roman milieu within which he situates the origins of the practice. Tangled Up in Text demonstrates how tefillin practice developed at the end of the Second Temple period both through innovative scriptural exegesis and through interaction with the pervasive use of apotropaic amulets in the Hellenistic world.

Cohn's text is divided into three main analytic sections. After an introduction to the previous scholarship on tefillin and the methodological grounds for his study (discussed here in the next paragraphs), Chapter 2 considers the scriptural passages later associated with tefillin practices (Exodus 13:1–10, 13:11–16; Deuteronomy 6:4–9, 11:13–21) and the possibility of interbiblical reception history of those passages within the Hebrew Bible. He concludes by asserting that these ambiguous passages from the Torah cannot reveal, by themselves, whether they indicate a literal rather than metaphorical placing of “signs” (ot/totafot) on the hand and forehead (46), and as a result of the preference for reading these verses metaphorically during the interbiblical reception of the verses, “it seems that it might be more effective to look to subsequent periods for the origins of the practice” (53). Cohn argues that tefillin as physical ritual cannot be dated to any biblical period prior to the Persian era.

The second main section of the work considers the late Second Temple period, and Cohn bases his argument primarily on archeological findings from the Judean desert. In short, he argues that “tefillin were an invented tradition of the late Second Temple era, functioning as a long-life amulet that arose from a literalist interpretation of scripture, and informed by knowledge of parallel Greek practices” (55). The tefillin and mezuzot manuscript slips found at Qumran, as well as leather tefillin cases associated with these archeological sites (few were found in situ), are the earliest evidence of a physical ritual object associated with the biblical passages noted above. By associating a “sign” to the injunctions found in each of the four passages with a physical ritual object (and inscribed text), Cohn argues that the Qumran evidence indicates a literalist reading of the verses instead of a metaphorical one. Nevertheless, the inconsistency among the verses inscribed on these slips identified as tefillin and mezuzot indicates to Cohn that this literalist reading was in no way uniform (and does not form a “proto-halakhah” that presages the later tannaitic sources). Cohn argues that contemporary non-Jewish apotropaic amulet practices (e.g., the Greek Magical Papyri) and the inconsistencies among the tefillin exemplars indicate that the original tefillin practices were both widespread and “were part of the religion of the common people” (99).

The third section of Cohn's book considers the evidence from tannaitic literature (Mishnah, Tosefta, and Midreshei Halakha) to ascertain tefillin practice from the period following the destruction of the Second Temple. Lacking any systematic treatment of tefillin in this literature, Cohn considers a wide range of tannaitic statements about the practice and concludes that tefillin were widely worn (by Jewish men and perhaps by women as well), even by children, most of the time. Tannaitic prohibitions on wearing tefillin outdoors on Shabbat, in bathhouses, and by individuals likely to contract ritual impurity lead Cohn to the conclusion that while the Tannaim were not concerned with mandating tefillin practice (a conclusion that furthers his assumption that the practice was popular and widespread), they were rather at times concerned with regulating aspects of the practice.

Methodologically, Cohn investigates his materials through a number of lenses, including the contemporary trend to refrain from disassociating “religious” practice from “magic” and the sociological approach of considering tefillin from an “etic” perspective (analyzing the potential meanings of the ritual without directly assuming how the “authors” of the ritual produced their meanings). In addition, Cohn draws from philological methods throughout his analysis, while considering literary approaches to his materials tangentially.

At the heart of Cohn's argument is his comparison of archeological findings from the Judean desert with the wide array of amulets that have been identified in the contemporary archeological record. If, Cohn argues, the scriptural passages that enjoin a “sign” of God's commandments were read metaphorically before the Hellenistic period, but the archeological record shows a novel sort of literal “sign” (tefillin) from the late-Second Temple era, this change in exegesis and practice should be located in the cultural and historical circumstances of this later period. Therefore, he argues, two factors, endogenous to the period of the production of the Qumran remains, contributed to the development of tefillin as a ritual: novel interpretation of the scriptural passages (concomitant with the change of status of the Hebrew Bible into a canonized text) and the omnipresence of a variety of apotropaic amulets found throughout the Greek world. “It thus seems plausible that the interaction with Hellenistic culture, with its widespread use of protective amulets, would have led Jews toward an integration of Greek practice with their own paramount source of authority, namely, the Torah” (89–90).

Cohn's diachronic analysis, which carefully avoids assuming that a practice discussed or evidenced in one context necessarily derives from or is predicated upon earlier or later contexts (an important corrective to analyses that read rabbinic halakhah back into the Qumran findings), provides the expert reader with important insights about the tefillin ritual as it developed endogenously in the late Second Temple period. Although these conclusions about the Qumran materials are illuminating, Cohn's conclusions about the tannaitic references to tefillin practice do not have the benefit of such material evidence: Only by “reading between the lines” (103) can Cohn claim that tannaitic treatments of tefillin practice reflect continued widespread use in this period (107) and the tannaitic halakhah (at times) follows “previous customary practice” (115). This reading of history through the tannaitic sources is supported at the local level by Cohn's careful literary and philological reading of these texts; the danger may lie in extrapolating from such a small section of texts to conclusions about the Jewish communities writ large in this later period. Cohn's work is an important contribution to the fields of Jewish magic, Jewish cultural history, and the history of halakhah, and will be of note to and significance for specialists in these fields.