Four layers, and which one is speaking

The object has been continuously explained for two thousand years, by four kinds of literature that do not agree and were never trying to. This room keeps them on separate shelves, and the one control it insists on is the one that tells you which shelf you are reading from.

1 · Torah (the verses themselves). Four passages, one instruction: bind. No boxes are described, no compartments, no colour, no count of turns. Everything physical about the object is absent from the text that commands it.

2 · Talmud, Menachot 34a–37b (finished c. 6th c.). Where the object actually comes from — the number of compartments, the arm, the height on the head, the knot, the black, the order of putting on and taking off. This is law, argued and disputed. Nothing mystical.

3 · The Zohar and the Lurianic material (13th–16th c.). The object read sefirotically, the head and arm as upper and lower unions, the straps as channels of light.

4 · Chabad and the modern expositions (18th–20th c.). Mochin over middot; the version most people have heard.

The order matters more than the content. A layer-3 reading of a layer-2 specification is fine and often lovely. A layer-3 reading presented as the reason for a layer-2 specification is a different claim entirely, and it is the move this app spends the whole annex objecting to when other people make it. The straps were black before anyone said what black meant.

Same rule as the postures room next door, and the same reason: the older material does not need to borrow the glamour of the newer.