The idea of priests wearing clothing or items to make them stand out from the common person had early beginnings, in the far eastern as well middle Mediterranean areas of the world.
Jewish scribes and Pharisees, for instance, wore small leather boxes on their foreheads and upper left arm. This was promoted by their literal interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament.
These small small leather square or rectangular black boxes, called, phylacteries, contantained a scripture passage in response to the command from God, who said, "These words that I am commanding you today must prove to be on your heart...And you must tie them as a sign upon your hand" and "as a frontlet band between your eyes."
Scholars think that the scribes and Pharisees had succumbed to this practice by the third or second century B.C.E. And not for good reasons.
Many of them made these little boxes extra large to impress the common people by their supposed piety. And many also thought that these phylacteries or black boxes were amulets that could protect them --a common superstition of the people of other nations, such as the Greeks. The Greeks called such black boxes "phylakterion and were a "means of protection".
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