The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus 13:9 hears a strange instruction and decodes it into practice. The verse says the deliverance from Egypt shall be "a sign upon your hand, and a memorial between your eyes." The Targumist reads that not as metaphor but as blueprint. The miracle must be inscribed and set forth on the tephilla of the hand, fastened to the top of the left arm, and on the tephilla of the head, set between the eyes on the forehead.
Here the Aramaic paraphrase quietly transforms the verse. What was a poetic memorial in Hebrew becomes tefillin, the black leather boxes Jews still bind each weekday morning. The Targum does not argue for this reading. It simply assumes it: the sign on the hand is the hand-tephilla, the memorial between the eyes is the head-tephilla.
And the purpose? "That the law of the Lord may be in thy mouth, because in strength, with a mighty hand, the Lord brought thee forth from Mizraim." The straps around the arm and the box above the brow are not amulets. They are a daily tether to a memory: the hand of a freed slave touching the hand of God that freed it. The Targumist wants the Jew who binds tefillin every morning to feel that the leather on the arm is the continuation of the outstretched arm that split open Egypt.
Takeaway: mitzvot are not abstract. The Targum teaches that a commandment can be a memory you wear on your body.