Eyes dim with grief
Job 17:7; Psalm 6:6-7; Psalm 38:9-10; Psalm 88:8-9; Lamentations 5:15-17.
What leads up to it
Five laments, from Job, three psalms and the end of Lamentations, describe eyes failing from weeping, waiting and grief.
What it says
These are the Bible's words for crying until you cannot see, and for the dimness that comes of long sorrow and long waiting. "My eyes grow dim with grief. I call to You daily." They are not about blindness as a judgment or a figure of unbelief. They are about what grief does to the body.
What the picture assumes about the blind
Nothing about blind people, and that is why they belong here. They assume only that eyes and sorrow are connected, which anyone who has wept knows. Some readers hear in them a possible physical dimming as well; the catalog marks these as uncertain for that reason.
Who is called blind
The speakers are the sufferers themselves: Job, David, the psalmist, the survivors of Jerusalem. These are the only verses in the catalog where the one whose eyes fail is also the one praying, and still praying.
From Brian
Open for Brian: What this passage says to someone who lives without sight.
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.
Henry takes all five laments as real eyes. Job "wept so much that he had almost lost his sight"; David "wept till he had almost wept his eyes out"; for Psalm 38 Henry offers three causes, much weeping, a discharge in the eyes, or faintness from low spirits; Lamentations 5:17 he glosses as the sight failing in "a fainting fit." On Psalm 88 he reads weeping and praying together: "prayers and tears go together, and they shall be accepted together." The 1915 encyclopedia gathers the same verses under the physical eye, apart from the figurative "eye of the heart."
Source: Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706-1721), on Job 17, Psalms 6, 38 and 88, and Lamentations 5; International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entry "Eye."
The passage
Job 17:7
7 My eyes have grown dim with grief, and my whole body is but a shadow.
Psalm 6:6-7
6 I am weary from groaning; all night I flood my bed with weeping and drench my couch with tears.
7 My eyes fail from grief; they grow dim because of all my foes.
Psalm 38:9-10
9 O Lord, my every desire is before You; my groaning is not hidden from You.
10 My heart pounds, my strength fails, and even the light of my eyes has faded.
Psalm 88:8-9
8 You have removed my friends from me; You have made me repulsive to them; I am confined and cannot escape.
9 My eyes grow dim with grief. I call to You daily, O LORD; I spread out my hands to You.
Lamentations 5:15-17
15 Joy has left our hearts; our dancing has turned to mourning.
16 The crown has fallen from our head. Woe to us, for we have sinned!
17 Because of this, our hearts are faint; because of these, our eyes grow dim—