blindness Summary and Overview

is extremely common in the East from many causes. Blind beggars figure repeatedly in the New Testament #Mt 12:22| and "opening the eyes of the blind" is mentioned in prophecy as a peculiar attribute of the Messiah. #Isa 29:18; 42:7| etc. The Jews were specially charged to treat the blind with compassion and care. #Le 19:14; De 27:18| Blindness willfully inflicted for political or other purposes is alluded to in Scripture. #1Sa 11:2; Jer 39:7|

BLIND'NESS is extremely common in the East, as all travellers in those lands observe. In Egypt especially ophthalmia prevails extensively among children and adults. The infliction of blindness was in old times a common as well as barbarous punishment or penalty of resistance to a victorious enemy. Jud 16:21; 1 Sam 11:2; 2 Kgs 25:7. There are several recorded occasions, when, as translated in A. V., God miraculously sent blindness. Gen 19:11; 2 Kgs 6:18; Acts 9:8; Acts 13:11. In these incidents there was not so much an actual, though transient, loss of vision as a confusion of sight -- perhaps really a mental confusion, which gave all the uncertainty of actual blindness, as in Luke 24:16. The word ''blindness" is likewise employed in a spiritual sense as meaning the sinner's inability to recognize divine truth; e.g. Rom 11:25; Eph 4:18.

Its cure is one of our Lord's most frequent miracles (Luke 7:21; Matthew 9:27; Mark 8:23; John 5:3; John 9:1), as had been foretold (Isaiah 29:18; Isaiah 35:5). In coincidence with this is the commonness of it in the E. In Ludd (Lydda) the saying is, every one is either blind or has but one eye. Jaffa has 500 blind out of 5,000 of a population. The dust and sand pulverized by the intense heat, the constant glare, and in the sandy districts the absence of the refreshing "green grass," (the presence of which Mark notices as noteworthy in the miracle of the feeding the multitudes,) the cold sea air on the coasts, the night dews affecting those sleeping on the roofs, all tend to produce blindness. It is a constant image used of spiritual darkness, and Jesus' restoration of sight to the blind pointed to the analogous spiritual bestowal of sight on the soul. Paul, who had passed through both the physical and the spiritual transition from darkness to light (Acts 9:8-9), instinctively, by an obviously undesigned coincidence confirming authenticity, often uses the expressive image (Acts 26:18; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 1:18; Ephesians 4:18; Colossians 1:13). Elymas was smitten with blindness at Paul's word (Acts 13:11, compare Genesis 19:11; 2 Kings 6:18). The blind were to be treated kindly (Leviticus 19:14; Deuteronomy 27:18). The pagan conquerors sometimes blinded captives (2 Kings 25:7; 1 Samuel 11:2).