"Although according to the Halacha Lemoshe Misinai there is no requirement for the Batim to be black, nevertheless it is a Mitzvah" Shulchan Aruch Harav website In Late Second Temple times about 2,000 years ago, the small leather cases housing tefillin were not dyed black as is customary today, according to an analysis published Thursday in PLOS ONE. The ember hue of the shriveled ancient phylacteries discovered in a cave near Qumran in 1949 was due to natural processes, not dyeing, writes the team led by Prof. Yonatan Adler of Ariel University, with Ilit Cohen Ofri and Yonah Maor of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Theresa Emmerich Kamper of England's University of Exeter and Iddo Pinkas of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Tefillin contain tiny parchment scrolls inscribed with biblical verses and are worn – one on the head and one on the forearm – during morning prayers. Today, a quick internet search finds instructions for how to don them, specifying that the black face of the straps and cases should face outward. But need they be black? Tests the team ran on the ancient cases, which weren't black or blackened per se, just a very dark color, showed they hadn't been dyed as assumed, Adler said in the IAA statement.
"Minor water leakage into the caves over the 2,000 years the artifacts have been there could have accelerated the leather aging process. In the past, we have found that some of the Dead Sea Scrolls have also undergone a similar process, which unfortunately .
