What blind means here
Most readers picture one thing when they read the word blind: no sight at all. That is the picture the Bible's writers seem to have had too, and it is the picture most of this site works from. But blindness in real life is a range, and this page is here to say so before you read anything else.
The swimming pool
From Brian: I tell people that blindness is kind of like a swimming pool, with people scattered all through it. Some are just dipping their toes in the water. Those are the people who need reading glasses. Some are in the shallow end and need corrective lenses to get through the day. Some are in the deep end, and that is where I am. It is all right, though. There is plenty of room to swim about, because fewer than one in ten of the people the world counts as blind have no sight at all. I have read a good many studies on that number and they do not agree, but none that I would trust puts it above ten percent. And we are all still in the pool together.
In my own blind community, many people do not need to feel along a wall to get around outside. Plenty of low-vision people do not grope about the way I would have to without my cane. They may read large print, or see shapes and light, or see well in daylight and nothing at dusk. Their hardships are just as real as mine. They are simply different hardships, and a sighted reader who has only met blindness in books may not know that.
What the Bible means by it
As best we can tell, when Scripture calls a person blind it means total blindness. The blind man in John 9 had never seen. Bartimaeus asks to see again. The healed men see faces and trees. The law pairs the blind with the lame, people who could not do the thing at all. Nothing in the text pictures someone who reads with difficulty or sees only in good light. That is why the studies on this site generally assume the blind person sees nothing, and why the "In their shoes" sections are written from Brian's own experience of total blindness.
But the Bible does describe the shallower end of the pool. It just does not use the word blind for it. Three old men are said to have eyes grown dim or weak, and one of them, Jacob, is plainly described as still seeing a little:
Genesis 27:1 When Isaac was old and his eyes were so weak that he could no longer see, he called his older son Esau and said to him, “My son.” “Here I am,” Esau replied.
Genesis 48:10 Now Israel’s eyesight was poor because of old age; he could hardly see. Joseph brought his sons to him, and his father kissed them and embraced them.
1 Kings 14:4 Jeroboam’s wife did as instructed; she arose and went to Shiloh and arrived at Ahijah’s house. Now Ahijah could not see, for his eyes were dim because of his age.
Mark 8:24 The man looked up and said, “I can see the people, but they look like trees walking around.”
So Isaac, Jacob, Eli and Ahijah may well have had some remaining sight, and the pages about them say so where it matters. Isaac tells his sons apart by voice and touch, not by looking. Jacob crosses his hands on Joseph's sons knowingly. Eli knows Samuel by his voice. Ahijah is warned by God who is at the door, which he would not have needed if he could see her face. The one place where the Bible shows us a man partway into sight is the man at Bethsaida, who in the middle of his healing sees people as walking trees. That is a fair description of what some low-vision people see every day.
Why it matters for reading this site
- When a page says "a blind person could not have done this," read it as "a person with no sight." Many blind people today could.
- When a page imagines feeling the way along a wall or counting steps, that is the deep end of the pool. It is Brian's end, and it is the end the Bible's writers had in mind, but it is not everyone's.
- When Scripture uses blindness as a picture of ignorance or hardness, it is drawing on total blindness, and the picture pages read it that way.
- If you meet a blind person after reading this site, do not assume you know how much they see. Ask, or better, let them tell you.
Brian's words
I was treating blindness as most readers do, as total blindness, until this came up, and I am totally blind myself. It is an easy thing to forget even from inside the pool. Blindness is a visual spectrum, and nearly everything on this site should be read with that in mind.