In a herding camp
What would have worried a blind person most, living in a family that moved with its flocks between camps, as Isaac's did?
Genesis 27:1-4; Genesis 48:8-12.
What leads up to it
Isaac and Jacob lived in tents and moved with their herds. Household and workplace were the same camp, and the people around a blind man were his own family and servants.
What it says
Both blind patriarchs are shown at home, in their tents, surrounded by family. Isaac sends for Esau and is served a meal; Jacob is brought his grandsons and embraces them. Neither is described leaving the camp. Both are deceived or doubted by the people closest to them, and both still exercise the authority of the head of the family: the blessing is theirs to give.
What it may tell us
A camp has no fixed streets to learn, and it moves. Water, fire, animals and tent ropes are everywhere. Everything a blind elder needed came through other hands. The text shows the two sides of that: care, and the chance to take advantage. And their loss of usable vision did not remove their responsibilities as heads of the family.
From Brian
It troubles me greatly when things are not where I expect to find them, and it is worse when something has been moved, usually by accident. I can't imagine trying to learn where everything was in my three-bedroom tent if everything got moved all the time.
When I walk outside my own home, I use familiar sounds to get my bearings, especially a little distance from the house, like taking the trash cans to the curb or checking the back gate. There is usually traffic on a four-lane road nearby. My neighbor used to have chickens, which I thought were an annoyance until they went away and I lost that auditory landmark. Sometimes there is Bruce, the friendly and loud retriever next door. If my sounds outside changed every day, I would not want to venture far from the house, especially without a cane to guide each step.
Until the ground got packed down, it would be hard to use any sort of stick to help with walking. One of my least favorite tasks is walking through grass with my cane. I keep a cane by my back door with a large round ball on the end so it rolls through grass more easily, but it is heavy and hard to lug around. Walking through grass for hours while we moved pastures would be very difficult. You would likely need to be led by hand everywhere, and people would get tired of doing that for someone all the time.
I am guessing it was hot much of the time, and at least for me, when my eyes were at their worst, heat was not a good idea. It could have been cataracts, glaucoma, macular degeneration or any of a number of eye diseases. They all hurt. They make your eyes water, itch and burn, and there were no artificial tears.
I shudder to think about the trip hazards these men faced. Tent ropes everywhere, and nothing to tell you where you were. It would be like crossing a parking lot full of concrete stops with no cane: constant stumbling and falling, without being able to see where you are falling.
Most of the men were shepherds all the time, and that job would have been next to impossible. It is hard enough for me to keep track of two dogs running around my feet, and they wear bells and are not sheep. A big part of handling animals is telling what one is about to do before it does it. Then there is the constant stepping in what sheep leave everywhere. That never quite comes out of your sandals.
I do a lot of the cooking in our house, but only because my heat sources are controlled, always in the same place, and fairly self-contained. Open fires give me the willies. Without a cane to feel my way, I would stay far from a fire, and a cane back then would have been wood, and would burn too.
How I would do it now
Open for Brian: the daily tasks of a herding camp, one by one, and how you would approach each today.
Other voices
Open: other blind people and their families will be asked the same question, and their answers will appear here with their permission.
The place and the time
What the old books and the archaeologists can add. Each paragraph names its source.
Isaac's household lived in tents of black goat's hair, held by ropes and pegs, divided inside by a hanging carpet. When the pasture around a camp was used up, Smith's dictionary says, the tents were struck, loaded on camels and moved; it cites Isaac's own chapter, Genesis 26, where he is pushed from place to place by the Philistines and his servants dig well after well. A blind man in such a household had no fixed streets to learn. Each move meant learning the ropes again.
Source: Smith's Bible Dictionary (1884 edition), entry "Tent"; Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706-1721), on Genesis 26.
The wells such a family depended on were cut into limestone, sometimes with steps down into them and a stone curb at the mouth, and water was drawn by rope and bucket. In a nomadic household, Smith's says, "every man, from the sheikh down to the slave, is more or less a shepherd," out in heat and cold among animals and raiders. Open wells, livestock and open country are the hazards of that life for anyone who cannot see them.
Source: Smith's Bible Dictionary (1884 edition), entries "Well" and "Shepherd."
Who looked after a blind elder? The shelf's only general answer is Smith's: among the Hebrews those who were poor through bodily infirmity "were usually taken care of by their kindred." The text of Genesis shows the same: Isaac's grown sons are within call, meals are brought to him, and the family does his seeing for him, for better and worse. The 1915 encyclopedia's physician adds that sand, glare and flies made eye disease common in that climate, and thought the old men's blindness was probably cataract.
Source: Smith's Bible Dictionary (1884 edition), entry "Beggar, Begging"; Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706-1721), on Genesis 27; International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entry "Blindness."
The fullest account of the tent on the shelf is the 1915 encyclopedia's: one great cloth of black goat hair over poles, stretched by ropes to hardwood pegs, with "a large wooden mallet for driving the pegs" as part of the regular equipment; mats on the floor, food in goat-hair bags and liquids in skins, a few copper pots. "It is the women's duty to pitch the tents." A sheikh had several tents, one for himself and guests, others for the women, servants and animals. Ropes and pegs at ankle height, in a layout redrawn at every move, are the camp's own stumbling blocks.
Source: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entry "Tent"; Wikipedia, "Bedouin," revision of 27 September 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Abraham sat at his tent door "in the heat of the day," and Henry reads that as the household's post for hospitality, there being no inns. The heat Brian asks about is in the text. So is the dust: Easton describes sand and dust storms that overtake travellers, "many perishing under them," and Smith's a wind that fills the air with sand like a yellow fog.
Source: Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706-1721), on Genesis 18; Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897), entry "Dust"; Smith's Bible Dictionary (1884 edition), entry "Plagues."
Eye disease in that climate was ordinary. The 1915 encyclopedia lists ophthalmia among the commonest diseases of the Bible lands, then and now; Smith's blames the flies that carry it from eye to eye. Modern medicine names trachoma, spread by flies, cloth and crowding, which blinds through repeated reinfection over years. Levy in 1872 counted the sun and sudden changes of weather among the usual causes. None of this says what Isaac had. It says that watering, itching, burning eyes were everywhere around him.
Source: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entry "Disease"; Smith's Bible Dictionary (1884 edition), entry "Fly"; Wikipedia, "Trachoma," revision of 18 September 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); W. H. Levy, Blindness and the Blind (1872).
One traveller's tale, at third hand, for Brian's point about being led everywhere: Levy repeats Casaubon's report, from Leo Africanus, of a blind man who guided a merchant caravan across the Arabian desert, riding a camel and leading the company "not by his eyes, which he had not, but by his smell." It is a story, not a record; it is also the only account on the shelf of a blind person finding the way in open country rather than being led through it.
Source: W. H. Levy, Blindness and the Blind (1872), quoting Meric Casaubon (1656) and Leo Africanus.
The passage
Genesis 27:1-4
1 When Isaac was old and his eyes were so weak that he could no longer see, he called his older son Esau and said to him, “My son.” “Here I am,” Esau replied.
2 “Look,” said Isaac, “I am now old, and I do not know the day of my death.
3 Take your weapons—your quiver and bow—and go out into the field to hunt some game for me.
4 Then prepare a tasty dish that I love and bring it to me to eat, so that I may bless you before I die.”
Genesis 48:8-12
8 When Israel saw the sons of Joseph, he asked, “Who are these?”
9 Joseph said to his father, “They are the sons God has given me in this place.” So Jacob said, “Please bring them to me, that I may bless them.”
10 Now Israel’s eyesight was poor because of old age; he could hardly see. Joseph brought his sons to him, and his father kissed them and embraced them.
11 “I never expected to see your face again,” Israel said to Joseph, “but now God has let me see your children as well.”
12 Then Joseph removed his sons from his father’s knees and bowed facedown.