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idea
Three wraps, three betrothals — you put it on as a ring
correspondences
nature
The three turns at the finger are accompanied, in very widespread custom, by Hosea 2:21–22 — and the verse contains the phrase three times:
"And I will betroth you to me for ever; and I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, and in loving-kindness and in mercy; and I will betroth you to me in faithfulness — and you shall know the Lord."
Three וְאֵרַשְׂתִּיךְ, v'erastich, I will betroth you. One per turn.
⭐ It is a wedding. Not by analogy — the words are a betrothal formula and the strap goes around a finger, three times, while they are said. Whatever else the object is doing, at the last three turns it stops being a sign on the arm and becomes a ring on a hand, and the person putting it on is on the receiving end of the vow rather than making it. That is a remarkable thing to find at the end of a procedure whose earlier steps are about the intellect governing the emotions.
Layer: the verse is eighth-century BCE and its use here is late-medieval custom, not law — it is absent from many rites and standard in others. The marriage-of-God-and-Israel reading of Hosea is ancient and mainstream; the Kabbalistic version of it, in which the union is the Shekhinah's, is a further layer again.
threads (5)
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