Canes, staffs and guides
How would you get around if there were no cane, only a stick or someone's hand?
Judges 16:25-26; Mark 8:22-23; Acts 13:11; Zechariah 8:4-5.
What leads up to it
Brian asked whether blind people in Bible times used canes or walking sticks, or were simply led. The passages gathered here are every place the text shows a blind person moving, plus one that shows the staff as the ordinary companion of old age.
What it says
Samson is held by the hand by a boy. Jesus takes the blind man of Bethsaida by the hand and leads him out of the village. Elymas, struck blind, gropes about looking for someone to lead him. Zechariah pictures old men and women in the streets of Jerusalem, each with a staff in hand because of age.
What it may tell us
Scripture shows guides, not canes. That does not prove no blind person ever felt the way with a stick; it means the writers mentioned the hand and not the stick. The place-and-time section below gathers what else can be known, from the Temple's rule against staffs to the first blind writers who described their own.
From Brian
Open for Brian: How would you get around if there were no cane, only a stick or someone's hand?
How I would do it now
Open for Brian: take the duties and daily tasks a blind person held in this setting, and say how you would approach each one today, having once done such things with sight and now without it.
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.
Start with what Scripture shows. Every blind person who moves in the Bible is led by the hand: Samson asks "the lad that held him by the hand" to let him feel the pillars; Elymas "went about seeking some to lead him by the hand"; Saul is led by the hand into Damascus; Jesus "took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town." No verse shows a blind person with a staff. That is the honest finding, and it is a finding about what the text mentions, not proof that no one used one. (The quotations here are in the King James wording that Henry prints.)
Source: Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706-1721), on Judges 16, Acts 9, Acts 13 and Mark 8.
Staffs themselves were everyday equipment. Jacob crossed the Jordan "with my staff"; Israel ate the Passover with staff in hand; Zechariah promises old men and women in Jerusalem's streets "every man with his staff in his hand for very age." Hebrew has several words for rod and staff. A blind man of any age in that world would have had a stick available, whatever he did with it.
Source: Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706-1721), on Genesis 32, Exodus 12 and Zechariah 8; International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entries "Staff" and "Rod."
One rule bears directly on the Temple. Edersheim, citing the rabbis, says no one might enter the Temple precincts carrying a staff, nor with shoes, scrip or purse, and he connects it to Jesus telling the Twelve to take no staff. The rule is stated for everyone; the shelf says nothing about an exception for the blind, so none is claimed. Edersheim also reports that crutches and a wooden leg were allowed on the Sabbath, the nearest the rabbinic sources on the shelf come to a mobility aid.
Source: Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883), Book III, chapter X, and chapter XXVII; Appendix XVII.
The oldest picture of a blind man walking with a stick on the shelf is a Greek myth. In one version of the Tiresias story, Athena gives the blind seer a staff of cornel-wood "wherewith he walked like those who see." Levy, writing in 1872, read that as proof the ancients were struck by blind people walking alone with a stick and made it a gift of the gods. From the Roman world, a wall painting at Herculaneum, buried in 79 AD, is said to show a blind man guided by a dog, though the article that reports it asks for more evidence. And in the book of Tobit, the blinded father's son travels with a dog.
Source: Wikipedia, "Tiresias," revision of 2 October 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); W. H. Levy, Blindness and the Blind (1872); Wikipedia, "Guide dog," revision of 2 October 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia, "Book of Tobit," revision of 8 August 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
The white cane is modern: a walking stick painted white in 1921, the first white-cane law in 1930, the long-cane technique in 1944. But blind people wrote about their sticks long before that. James Wilson, blind from infancy, described in 1838 how a blind walker drifts toward the hand that holds the staff, and how he was once stopped two steps from a well eighty feet deep while "groping about with my staff" at a fork in the road. Levy's 1872 manual teaches sweeping the stick side to side with the feet and gauging every step with it, "as the life of the individual may depend on the result." Brian will recognize both.
Source: Wikipedia, "White cane," revision of 25 September 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); James Wilson, Biography of the Blind (1838); W. H. Levy, Blindness and the Blind (1872).
The passage
Judges 16:25-26
25 And while their hearts were merry, they said, “Call for Samson to entertain us.” So they called Samson out of the prison to entertain them. And they stationed him between the pillars.
26 Samson said to the servant who held his hand, “Lead me where I can feel the pillars supporting the temple, so I can lean against them.”
Mark 8:22-23
22 When they arrived at Bethsaida, some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him.
23 So He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village. Then He spit on the man’s eyes and placed His hands on him. “Can you see anything?” He asked.
Acts 13:11
11 Now look, the hand of the Lord is against you, and for a time you will be blind and unable to see the light of the sun.” Immediately mist and darkness came over him, and he groped about, seeking someone to lead him by the hand.
Zechariah 8:4-5
4 This is what the LORD of Hosts says: “Old men and old women will again sit along the streets of Jerusalem, each with a staff in hand because of great age.
5 And the streets of the city will be filled with boys and girls playing there.”