In first-century Jerusalem
What would have worried a blind person most in a crowded city built on hills, with stepped streets, pilgrim crowds and the Temple at the top?
John 9:1-8; John 5:2-7; Matthew 21:14; Acts 3:1-3.
What leads up to it
Jesus's Jerusalem was a city of steep streets, large pools, pilgrim crowds at the feasts and a Temple whose outer court held a market. Blind people appear at its Temple gate, on the covered walkways of a pool, and sitting where neighbours passed every day.
What it says
The man born blind sat and begged where his neighbours knew him. The sick lay in the porches of Bethesda, where one man had no one to help him. The blind and the lame came to Jesus inside the Temple. A lame man was carried daily to the Temple gate to beg from those going in. Begging had its places, and the places were at the thresholds of the holy.
What it may tell us
The city gave a blind person two things a village did not: crowds large enough to beg from, and a scale of streets, steps and pools that made moving alone much harder. The man born blind walked the length of the city to Siloam on a stranger's word. That walk, and the daily walk to a begging place and back, are the practical questions these pages want answered by people who have made such walks.
From Brian
With conveniences come more hardships. It would be a fine thing to live in a city with real streets and walls, but the steps would be a great problem, and close to impossible to manage alone without a cane or stick to guide you.
I would think the blind in Jerusalem got to know the city well by the different sounds of its streets. And it was probably competitive, unfortunately, for the good spots and the peak times when the pilgrims came.
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.
Begging grew with the big cities. The 1915 encyclopedia says beggars "formed a considerable class in the gospel age" and names their places: the entrance to Jericho, where pilgrims passed on the way up to the feasts; the neighborhood of rich men's houses; and above all the gates of the Temple. Its reasons are the absence of any organized relief, the absence of medicine for common eye disease, and the poverty of a heavily taxed country. Edersheim places the man born blind at the Temple entrance, "the chosen spot for those who solicited charity," asking, as beggars then did, "Gain merit by me."
Source: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entry "Beg, Beggar, Begging"; Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883), Book IV, chapter IX.
There was organized charity too. Edersheim describes alms collected every week in each town, in money or in food, by two collectors and distributed by three, "so as to avoid the suspicion of dishonesty or partiality," and quotes the rabbinic saying that when a poor man stands at your door, God stands at his right hand. A blind beggar at the Temple gate lived somewhere between that system and the crowd's loose change.
Source: Edersheim, Sketches of Jewish Social Life (1876), chapters 4 and 18.
The city was built on steps. Fifteen steps, Edersheim says, led up from the Court of the Women to the inner court; Josephus counts fourteen, with more at the gates. Thirty-four rock-cut steps led up from the Pool of Siloam. The Hasmoneans had built wide stepped roads to carry the feast crowds toward the Temple gates, and at Passover the city held somewhere between hundreds of thousands and, by Josephus's probably inflated count, millions. For a blind person, Jerusalem was steps and crowds.
Source: Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883), Book II, chapter X; Josephus, The Wars of the Jews (Whiston translation), Book V, chapter 5, and Book II, chapter 14; Wikipedia, "Second Temple" and "Pool of Siloam" (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Getting to the city was its own problem. The ascent to Jerusalem from any side but the south is "perpetual," in Dean Stanley's phrase quoted by Smith's; Josephus says the hills around it are ringed by deep, impassable valleys; and Edersheim describes the road up from Jericho as a rough track winding over rock and loose stones with a steep drop on one side. The blind men at Jericho, in his telling, knew Jesus was coming because they "heard the tramp of many feet."
Source: Smith's Bible Dictionary (1884 edition), entry "Jerusalem"; Josephus, The Wars of the Jews (Whiston translation), Book V, chapter 4; Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883), Book V, chapter I, and Book IV, chapter XXIV.
Josephus, who knew the city before it fell, describes two hills facing each other with a valley between, the houses on each hill running down to it. The Valley of the Cheesemongers ran south to Siloam. Of the Temple's four western gates, one led across a bridge to the upper city and one "descended down into the valley by a great number of steps, and thence up again." The 1915 encyclopedia puts it simply: Jerusalem has always been "houses terraced on steep slopes with stairways for streets," with a main street running down the valley over a rock-cut drain.
Source: Josephus, The Wars of the Jews (Whiston translation), Book V, chapter 4; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (Whiston translation), Book XV, chapter 11; International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entry "Jerusalem."
Excavation has given the main street dimensions. The stepped street from the southern gates by Siloam up to the Temple Mount's south-west corner was about eight meters wide and six hundred meters long, paved in a rhythm of two steps and a long landing, two steps and a landing, all the way up. At the top, Robinson's Arch carried a monumental staircase over the street to the Royal Stoa, spanning fifteen meters and rising about seventeen above the pavement. The street was laid in the 30s AD or later, so it may postdate John 9, but the route it paved is the route the man born blind walked.
Source: Wikipedia, "Stepped street (Jerusalem)," revision of 16 August 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikipedia, "Robinson's Arch," revision of 12 August 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Inside the Temple it was steps again. Josephus counts fourteen steps up from the outer court to the second, more to the gates, fifteen from the Court of the Women to the inner court, and twelve up to the sanctuary itself; Edersheim agrees on the fifteen. The Temple Mount platform Herod built measures roughly 488 by 315 meters on its longer sides, raised on walls that, on the west, rose some 84 feet from the valley floor.
Source: Josephus, The Wars of the Jews (Whiston translation), Book V, chapter 5; Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897), entry "Tyropoeon Valley"; Wikipedia, "Temple Mount," revision of 24 September 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Edersheim's walk through Herod's Jerusalem gives the sound of it: the lower city as the business quarter of markets, bazaars and streets of trades and guilds; narrow streets with shops beside mansions; and craftsmen at work in the open, "the shoemaker hammering his sandals, the tailor plying his needle." For someone navigating by ear, every trade street had its own noise.
Source: Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (1883), Book I, chapter I.
The passage
John 9:1-8
1 Now as Jesus was passing by, He saw a man blind from birth,
2 and His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
3 Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God would be displayed in him.
4 While it is daytime, we must do the works of Him who sent Me. Night is coming, when no one can work.
5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”
6 When Jesus had said this, He spit on the ground, made some mud, and applied it to the man’s eyes.
7 Then He told him, “Go, wash in the Pool of Siloam” (which means “Sent”). So the man went and washed, and came back seeing.
8 At this, his neighbors and those who had formerly seen him begging began to ask, “Isn’t this the man who used to sit and beg?”
John 5:2-7
2 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool with five covered colonnades, which in Hebrew is called Bethesda.
3 On these walkways lay a great number of the sick, the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed.
5 One man there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.
6 When Jesus saw him lying there and realized that he had spent a long time in this condition, He asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
7 “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am on my way, someone else goes in before me.”
Matthew 21:14
14 The blind and the lame came to Him at the temple, and He healed them.
Acts 3:1-3
1 One afternoon Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour.
2 And a man who was lame from birth was being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful, where he was put every day to beg from those entering the temple courts.
3 When he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money.