to look around: to sweep the eyes over the whole circle of people or things present, rather than fixing them on one point
The word is the ordinary verb for looking (βλέπω) with a small word meaning "around" attached, and the addition does all the work. The eyes travel over everyone and everything nearby instead of settling on one face, which makes it the natural opposite of the word for a look aimed at a single person (ἐμβλέπω).
It is close to a signature of Mark's Gospel. Six of its seven appearances are in Mark, and the seventh is Luke keeping the detail in a scene he took over from Mark. Mark likes to tell us what Jesus's eyes did, and this is the gesture he reports most often: Jesus takes in the room, and then he speaks.
- He sweeps his eyes over the hostile crowd in the synagogue, angry and grieved at them, and then heals the man's withered hand (Mark 3:5).
- He looks around at the people seated in a circle about him and says that these are his mother and his brothers (Mark 3:34).
- He looks around, and then tells his disciples how hard it is for the rich to enter God's kingdom (Mark 10:23).
- In Luke's telling of the synagogue healing he looks around at every one of them before giving the command (Luke 6:10).
Twice the sweep takes in surroundings instead of faces. The disciples look around on the mountain and find nobody left with them but Jesus (Mark 9:8), and Jesus looks around at everything in the temple courts before leaving for the night, a survey that reads like an inspection once you see what he does there the next morning (Mark 11:11). Once, in Mark 5:32, the looking is a search rather than a survey: he keeps scanning the crowd to find the woman who had touched him, and English usually has to add words such as "to see who" before that comes through.