Smith's Bible Dictionary (1863)
is extremely common in the East from many causes. Blind beggars figure repeatedly in the New Testament (Matthew 12:22) and “opening the eyes of the blind” is mentioned in prophecy as a peculiar attribute of the Messiah. (Isaiah 29:18; 42:7) etc. The Jews were specially charged to treat the blind with compassion and care. (Leviticus 19:14; 27:18) Blindness willfully inflicted for political or other purposes is alluded to in Scripture.
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible (1898)
BLIND'NESS is extremely common in the East, as all travellers in those lands observe. In Egypt especially ophthalmia prevails extensively among children and adults. The infliction of blindness was in old times a common as well as barbarous punishment or penalty of resistance to a victorious enemy. Jud 16:21; 1 Sam 11:2; 2 Kgs 25:7. There are several recorded occasions, when, as translated in A. , God miraculously sent blindness. Gen 19:11; 2 Kgs 6:18; Acts 9:8; Acts 13:11.
In these incidents there was not so much an actual, though transient, loss of vision as a confusion of sight — perhaps really a mental confusion, which gave all the uncertainty of actual blindness, as in Luke 24:16. g. Rom 11:25; Eph 4:18.