Eyes to the Blind

I was eyes to the blind, and feet was I to the lame.
I was a father to the poor: and the cause which I knew not I searched out.
And I brake the jaws of the wicked, and plucked the spoil out of his teeth.

-- Job 29: 15-17 (KJV)

Anything would look good compared to Job's present misery, but he does go overboard in praising his past. Rivers of oil once poured forth to him from rocks; young men feared him, and the old revered him; he struck awe in princes and noblemen and drew blessings from every mouth. All this was because he was superhumanly good -- a deliverer of the miserable, fatherless, and abandoned; a comforter of the widowed; a font of righteousness and justice; "eyes to the blind," "feet to the lame," "father to the poor," and so on and so forth.

Job's high opinion of the man he used to be may partly explain why God has singled him out for disaster. As a supremely proud, if pious, man, Job could probably benefit from a lesson in the mysteriousness of God's ways -- success, as well as failure, may have very little to do with just desserts. And if this is part of the message, then the Book of Job presents an argument very different from that of the preceding books, in which the Lord rewards those who obey his laws and afflicts those who ignore them.

In any case, we have only Job's word for it that he was "eyes to the blind" -- which he probably means more literally than we do in quoting him. Today the phrase most often refers to intellectual, not literal, blindness and its putative remedies.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!