The taunt at Jerusalem
Blind people among the crowd and at the table. No change in sight is described. 2 Samuel 5:6-10.
What led up to it
David has just become king over all Israel and marches on Jerusalem, a fortress still held by the Jebusites.
What happens
The Jebusites mock him: even the blind and the lame could keep him out. David takes the city, and a saying follows: "The blind and the lame will never enter the palace."
In their shoes
This is a hard passage, and readers do not agree on what it means. Blind and lame people are used as an insult by one side and named with contempt by the other. It is included because it is in the text, and because of what happens in the same city in Matthew 21:14, when the blind and the lame come to Jesus in the temple and He heals them.
The place and the time
What the old books and the archaeologists can add. Each paragraph names its source.
Josephus took the verse literally. In his telling the Jebusites shut their gates and set the blind, the lame and the maimed on the wall to mock David, saying that even they could keep him out, and trusted in the strength of their walls. His translator Whiston defended that reading in a note. Modern readers take the verse in several ways, and this is one of them.
Source: Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (Whiston translation), Book VII, chapter 3, with Whiston's note.
Jebus was the old name of Jerusalem, "the city of the Jebusites." Smith's traces them to a son of Canaan and notes that they held their citadel until David took it. The 1915 encyclopedia observes that in the lists of the peoples of Canaan the Jebusites always come last, probably because they were few.
Source: Smith's Bible Dictionary (1884 edition), entry "Jebus"; International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), entry "Jebusite."
The passage
2 Samuel 5:6-10
6 Now the king and his men marched to Jerusalem against the Jebusites who inhabited the land. The Jebusites said to David: “You will never get in here. Even the blind and lame can repel you.” For they thought, “David cannot get in here.”
7 Nevertheless, David captured the fortress of Zion (that is, the City of David).
8 On that day he said, “Whoever attacks the Jebusites must use the water shaft to reach the lame and blind who are despised by David.” That is why it is said, “The blind and the lame will never enter the palace.”
9 So David took up residence in the fortress and called it the City of David. He built it up all the way around, from the supporting terraces inward.
10 And David became greater and greater, for the LORD God of Hosts was with him.