a sudden dazzling sent by God that leaves people unable to make sense of what is in front of them
This rare word turns up in only two stories, and both are the same kind of scene: a hostile group closes in, and God disables them on the spot. The men crowding Lot's door at Sodom are struck so that they wear themselves out groping for the entrance, and the Aramean troops sent to seize Elisha are struck so that the prophet can walk them straight into the middle of Samaria.
English Bibles almost always say "blindness," but three things point somewhere slightly different:
- Hebrew already had an ordinary word for blindness (עִוָּרוֹן), so reaching for a rare word instead marks this out as something else.
- The people struck can still stand, walk, follow, and grope about, which is not how a crowd behaves when it has just lost its sight altogether.
- The word looks to be built from a word for shining, naming the blaze of light rather than the darkness that follows it.
Most scholars now read it as dazzled, disoriented misperception: the eyes still work, but nothing they take in can be placed. The medieval commentator Rashi said as much long before anyone could check it against Akkadian, describing an affliction in which a person "sees but does not know what he is seeing." The oldest Greek translation of these two verses reaches for an unusual term it otherwise saves for a curse of madness and confusion, and the old Aramaic versions use a word for a sudden darkening of the eyes with dizziness.
The two scenes it links pull in opposite directions. At Sodom the dazzling shuts down an assault and opens the way for the city's ruin the next morning. At Samaria it disarms an army without a blow, and the captives are fed and sent home. The same flash of divine light ends one story in fire and the other in a shared meal.
Disputed
Whether the word denotes ordinary blindness that comes on suddenly, or a dazzling that disorients perception without removing sight.
- majorityThe word is specialized: it names a radiant, disorienting flash, so those struck misperceive rather than lose their sight. Both narratives require it, since the afflicted still move about and are led.; HALOT, s.v. סַנְוֵרִים ("dazzling, deception"); E. A. Speiser, Genesis (Anchor Bible 1), pp. 138-143; Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings (Anchor Bible 11), p. 74; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary); Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 16-50 (WBC 2); Robert L. Cohn, 2 Kings (Berit Olam)
- minorityThe word simply means sudden blindness, miraculously inflicted; its unusual form and rarity do not require a distinct sense beyond that.; BDB, s.v. סַנְוֵרִים ("sudden blindness"); David J. A. Clines (ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. סַנְוֵרִים