to feel something over with the hands: to run the hands across a person or an object in order to find out what is there
This verb is about hands, never about emotions. It describes deliberate, exploring touch: running the hands over a person, a surface, or a pile of belongings in order to learn something. That is what sets it apart from the ordinary word for touching (נָגַע), which names the contact itself, however brief or forceful; this word names the searching that the contact is doing.
The same action turns up in three settings:
- Isaac, old and blind, has Jacob come close so he can feel him and settle who is standing there.
- Laban goes through Jacob's tents by hand, working over every bag, and comes up with nothing.
- The blind man, the cursed nation, and the stripped leader all grope at midday as though it were night, hands out, getting nowhere.
What holds these together is that seeing has failed or is not enough, so the hands take over the work of the eyes.
Because of that, the word carries real weight in the poetry. Groping at noon is one of the sharpest pictures of helplessness in the Hebrew Bible: the person is not merely in the dark but has lost the way and cannot find it again. The plague over Egypt turns the picture into an event, a darkness heavy enough to feel.
Nuances
How to construe the final clause of Exodus 10:21, in which the verb stands beside the noun for darkness with no expressed human subject.
- majorityThe darkness is what gets felt: a darkness dense enough to touch. The Greek translation of Exodus already rendered it as palpable darkness, and most modern English versions keep that reading.; Septuagint, Exodus 10:21 (ψηλαφητὸν σκότος)
- minorityThe verb has an unexpressed human subject, so the clause means that people would grope in the darkness. Everywhere else the verb describes a person feeling with the hands, which favours the same construal here.; BDB, s.v. משׁשׁ; HALOT, s.v. משׁשׁ