Chava wore tefillin?

You can get all excited about a new source, and unfortunately, it can turn out just to be people mistakenly citing things.

Hebrewbooks recently uploaded a pretty impressive work, called be-Darkei Avot that collects many short statements of various rishonim and acharonim which talk about various issues within the assumption that all (good) characters in the Torah before revelation also kept the Torah. One of them caught my eye, a quote from the Zohar (Genesis 28a) that the "skins" that God dressed Adam and Eve in, were actually Tefillin. That would be an exciting new source I haven't seen mentioned in last year's debates over women wearing tefillin in Orthodoxy, where God actually dresses a woman in tefillin!

The acharon whose book title is "Birkat Avot" brings it up because he has a gevaldig question.

How could Eve wear tefillin if we know from several sources in the Talmud (Jerusalem Talmud Berachot page5, Jerusalem Talmud Shabbat page3) that keeping commandments that you are exempt from is just idiocy, and women are exempt from tefillin since it is a commandment that is time bound! Wasn't God/Eve paying attention to the Yerushalmi?

He answers that the reason it is called idiocy is because of the suspicion of self-aggrandizement, also called "yuhara", and since Adam and Eve were the only ones around, there was no fear of trying to show off.

See:

Unfortunately, the Zohar simply doesn't say anything about literal Adam and Eve wearing tefillin. The actual quote goes like this:

תפקחנה עיני שניהם, וידעו ישראל כי ערומים הם בטונא דמצרים, דהוו בלא אורייתא, ואתמר בהו (יחזקאל טז ז) ואת ערום ועריה, ואיוב בגין דא אמר ב' זמני (איוב א כא) ערום יצאתי מבטן אמי וערום אשוב שמה, מה דהוה משה, אתהפך לערב רב לשמה ולשנינה, אשוב שמה, הכא רמיז דעתיד לאחזרא בינייהו בגלותא בתראה, ואזיל בינייהו לשמ"ה, ואיהו אמר (שם) יהו"ה נתן ויהו"ה לקח יהי שם יהו"ה מבורך. ובזמנא דאתברו תרין לוחין דאורייתא, ואורייתא דבעל פה, אתמר בהון ויתפרו עלה תאנה, אתכסו בכמה קליפין מערב רב, בגין כי ערומים הם, דלא יתגלי עריתייהו, וכסוייא דילהון כנפי ציצית, ורצועין דתפלין, דעלייהו אתמר:
ויעש יהו"ה אלהי"ם לאדם ולאשתו כתנות עור וילבישם, אבל לגבי ציציות ויתפרו עלה תאנה ויעשו להם חגורות, דא איהו (תהלים מה ד) חגור חרבך על ירך גבור, ודא ק"ש, דאתמר ביה (שם קמט ו) רוממות אל בגרונם וגו', דא הוא ויעשו להם חגורות:

Basically, and I won't pretend I know Zohar at all, but I can gather that the Zohar is reading the Adam and Eve story as a metaphor for the story of the genesis of the Israelite nation in Egypt and after. So the "opening of their eyes that they were naked" was the Jews realizing their situation in Egypt, that they didn't have a Torah. When Moses broke the two tablets, and the Oral Torah, they were naked again, and wrapped themselves in tzitzit and tefillin, as it says that "God made for Adam and his wife skin clothing and dressed them."

So it's not talking about Adam and Eve at all, but of the Jewish people. 

So much for that source. It means that the Birkat Avot misread his source very badly, and be-Darkei Avot didn't check his sources.