Like the blind
Deuteronomy 28:28-29; Isaiah 59:9-10; Lamentations 4:13-15; Zephaniah 1:17.
What leads up to it
Four passages compare a people under judgment to blind people moving: groping at noon, feeling along a wall, wandering the streets, walking like the blind. Deuteronomy's is a curse for breaking the covenant; the others describe Jerusalem's fall or the day of the LORD.
What it says
These are similes, not statements about anyone's eyes. Judgment feels like this: you cannot find your way, you stumble in broad daylight, you feel along the wall of a city you used to know. The pictures are drawn from watching blind people move, and they are exact: the hand on the wall, the slow step, the midday that is no help.
What the picture assumes about the blind
The figure assumes that to move like a blind person is to be lost, slow and exposed, and it assumes the writer has watched blind people do these things. The observation is accurate as far as it goes; a blind reader will recognize the wall. What it leaves out is that the blind man feeling along the wall knows where he is going. The people in these verses do not.
Who is called blind
No blind person is the subject of any of these verses. The subjects are a nation under curse, a city whose prophets shed blood, mankind on the day of the LORD. The blind appear only as the image, which means they were familiar enough in the streets to serve as one.
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 reads every one of these similes as judgment on the mind or as helplessness. Deuteronomy 28: those "wilfully blind to their duty deserve to be made blind to their interest," and so grope at noon. Isaiah 59, the people's own confession: "we see no way open for our relief, nor know which way to expect it." Lamentations 4, of the prophets and priests: "blind to every thing that is good, but to do evil they were quick-sighted," and shunned like a corpse.
Source: Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1706-1721), on Deuteronomy 28, Isaiah 59 and Lamentations 4.
Behind the similes stand real people. The 1915 encyclopedia sees "no reason to believe, as has been surmised, that blindness was any less rife in ancient times than it is now," and both it and Easton's set the Law's protections beside the figures: care for the blind was specially commanded, and wrongs against them counted as breaches of the Law. The writers who said "like the blind" had watched blind neighbors feel their way along the walls of their own towns.
Source: International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entry "Blindness"; Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897), entry "Blind."
The passage
Deuteronomy 28:28-29
28 The LORD will afflict you with madness, blindness, and confusion of mind,
29 and at noon you will grope about like a blind man in the darkness. You will not prosper in your ways. Day after day you will be oppressed and plundered, with no one to save you.
Isaiah 59:9-10
9 Therefore justice is far from us, and righteousness does not reach us. We hope for light, but there is darkness; for brightness, but we walk in gloom.
10 Like the blind, we feel our way along the wall, groping like those without eyes. We stumble at midday as in the twilight; among the vigorous we are like the dead.
Lamentations 4:13-15
13 But this was for the sins of her prophets and the guilt of her priests, who shed the blood of the righteous in her midst.
14 They wandered blind in the streets, defiled by this blood, so that no one dared to touch their garments.
15 “Go away! Unclean!” men shouted at them. “Away, away! Do not touch us!” So they fled and wandered. Among the nations it was said, “They can stay here no longer.”
Zephaniah 1:17
17 I will bring such distress on mankind that they will walk like the blind, because they have sinned against the LORD. Their blood will be poured out like dust and their flesh like dung.