Taking Off the Blindfold

Open my eyes, that I may behold wonderful things from Your Law.  Psalm 119:18  NASB

Open – Are you blindfolded and don’t even know it?  Are you sitting in the cave starring at the wall, seeing shadows of things passing behind you and thinking that those shadows are real?  Well, here’s the solution.  גָּלָה (gālâ) uncover, remove.

Hebrew gālâ in its transitive meaning “to uncover” has its closest connections with Northwest Semitic (cf. Phoenician in the Ahiram Inscription, “ … and uncovered this sarcophagus,” and Imperial Aramaic in the Word of Ahiqar, “Do not reveal your secrets to your friends”) and with Arabic galā “to make/become clear.”^[1]

In this particular verse, gālâ is in the Pi’el tense.  That’s interesting because we would read the translation as if it were a command—“Take off the blindfold!”—but the Pi’el isn’t an imperative.  It’s a statement of fact.  In other words, uncovering is what God does.  Revealing what is hidden is the divine intention.  The only reason someone wears a spiritual blindfold is because he refuses to let God remove it.  Paul comes to the same conclusion when he writes, “because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.  For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, being understood by what has been made, so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:19-20 NASB).  Would we have expected anything less from a Jewish rabbi in the first century?  The idea had been germinating for a thousand years before Paul endorsed it.  God is obvious if you decide to remove the blindfold.

This, of course, has enormously dreadful implications.  What it means is that, as Paul says, there is no excuse for not seeing the truth.  And that means those who refuse to look are still held accountable.  That’s virtually everyone.  I include the vast numbers of other monotheistic espousing religious supplicants who have either truncated the corpus of the text or altered it to fit incompatible religious doctrine.  I include all those in pagan practices whose god or gods are antithetical to the revealed character of YHVH.  I include those who claim indifference, agnostic self-reliance, or Enlightenment sycophants.  And I include me.  The man whose rational preoccupation and scholarly bent often discovers he’s not living it, just thinking it.  A sad day indeed.  Perhaps we all need the wakeup call, “Open my eyes.”  Certainly we need to notice that the poet doesn’t ask for vision of the wonders of creation.  He asks to “see” the wonders of the Law.  Remove the blindfold that keeps me from beholding those wonderful things found in Your torah.  I wonder how many religious people around the world are living in the dark when it comes to Moses.

Topical Index: blindfold, open, gālâ, tôrâ, Psalm 119:18

^[1] Waltke, B. K. (1999). 350 גָּלָה. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 160). Moody Press.