About

Why this exists, and how it is being made.

The verse

Walking by faith took time to learn. The same is true for anyone moving to life without sight: it takes time to trust new methods and new tools, like a white cane or a screen reader. That is why 2 Corinthians 5:7 has slowly become my verse.

Brian Clark

How the work is done

• Every study starts from the text. The catalog lists each passage so that any reader can check it.
• Sorting passages into groups is a judgment. Where a passage could be read another way, the catalog says so.
• Physical blindness came first, then the law, daily life, and the verses where blindness is a picture. The wider themes of sight, light and darkness come later.
• Blindness is a spectrum. The Bible's word for it means total blindness, and so do most pages here; the page on what blind means says so up front.
• The site is built for screen readers first: plain headings, real tables, no images that carry meaning.

The text

Scripture is quoted from the Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible, BSB, produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee. It was dedicated to the public domain on April 30, 2023. The official text is used word for word, as published at berean.bible.

The reference shelf

For the place and the time behind each story, the site draws on works that are in the public domain or freely licensed, and names the source beside every statement taken from them:

• Alfred Edersheim, Sketches of Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ (1876) and The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883).
• Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews and The Wars of the Jews, translated by William Whiston.
• Smith's Bible Dictionary (1884 edition) and the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915).
• Matthew Henry's Commentary, all six volumes, and the Pulpit Commentary on Job 29.
• The Code of Hammurabi (C. H. W. Johns, 1903) and the Instruction of Amenemope (E. A. Wallis Budge, 1924), for the laws and wisdom of the nations around Israel.
• James Wilson's Biography of the Blind (1838) and W. Hanks Levy's Blindness and the Blind (1872), for the history of blind people since.
• Wikipedia articles on the places, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, cited by revision date.

These older works carry the assumptions of their time, and some speak of the Jewish people and teachers of Jesus's day in ways we would not. They are used for facts about places, customs and daily life, read with that in mind.

Made with help

The research and the site are built by Brian Clark working with Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Brian decides what the studies conclude. The method is described on how it was made.