John 9:6-7

“ Having said this, he spat on the ground and made clay of the spittle, and he anointed with this clay the eyes of the blind Man 1:7 and he said to him; Go, wash in the pool of Siloam (a name which means, Sent). He went away therefore and washed, and came seeing. ”

By the words: having said this, the evangelist presents the following act as the immediate application of the principle which Jesus has just laid down. In Matthew 20:34 (Mark 10:46), Jesus heals a blind man by a simple touch. In Mark 7:33; Mark 8:23, He uses, as here, His saliva for effecting cures. He makes use of an external means, therefore, only in some cases. Hence it follows that He does not use it as a medical agency. Is this the vehicle or the conductor of His miraculous power, as some have thought?

The same reason prevents us from deciding for this view. We must rather see in this manner of acting a pedagogic measure, not with the aim of putting the faith of the sick man to the test, as He is about to do with the blind man (Calvin), but to the end of entering into more direct and personal contact with him. When Jesus had to do with sick persons who possessed all their senses, He could act upon them with a look or with a word. But in cases like that of the deaf-mute (Mark 7:33 ff.) and of the blind man (Mark 8:23) we see Him making use of some material means to put them in relation to His person and to present to their faith its true object. It was necessary that they should know that their cure emanated from His person. This knowledge was the starting-point for their faith in Him as the author of their salvation.

And if in the case with which we are occupied, Jesus does more than anoint the eyes of the blind man, if He covers them with a mass of clay, adding thus to the natural blindness an artificial blindness, and sends him to wash in Siloam, the aim of this course of action can hardly be that which Meyer and Weiss suppose, to give to the organ, which had never performed its functions before, time to be formed and to be made ready to act; for when once miraculous power is admitted, it cannot be limited in this way; it is more probable that in this point also the aim of Jesus was of a moral nature. The pool of Siloam had played an important part in the feast which had come to its end. In the solemn and daily libation (p. 75), this fountain had been presented to the people as the emblem of the theocratic favors and the pledge of all the Messianic blessings. This typical significance of Siloam rested upon the Old Testament which had established a contrast between this humble fountain, springing up noiselessly at the foot of the temple mountain (the waters of Shiloah which flow sweetly), emblem of the divine salvation wrought by the Messiah (Emmanuel), and the great waters (of the Euphrates), the symbol of the brute force of the enemies of the theocracy (Isaiah 8:7). What then does Jesus do by adding to the real blindness of this man, which He alone can cure, this artificial and symbolic blindness, which the water of Siloam is to remove? In the first place, He expressly gives to the sacred fountain a part in His work of healing, as He had not done in chap. 5 with reference to the pool of Bethesda, and He thus places this work more evidently to the eyes of all under the protection of God Himself. God is thereby associated, as it were, in this new Sabbatic work (Lange). Then, He presents Himself as the real fountain of Siloam of which the prophet had spoken (Isaiah 8:7) and thus declares to the people that this type of the grace of Jehovah is now fulfilled in Him.

It is undoubtedly this symbolic significance attributed to the water of Siloam, which explains the remark of the evangelist: a name which signifies: Sent. From the philological point of view, the correctness of the translation given by John is no longer disputed. It is acknowledged that the name Siloam is a verbal substantive or adjective from שָׁלַח, H8938, and derived from the passive participle Kal or rather Piel (with the solution of the daghesh forte in the into י). What was the origin of this title? The pool of Siloam, discovered by Robinson near the place where the three valleys of Tyropeon, Hinnom and Jehoshaphat meet together, is fed by a subterranean conduit recently discovered, which starts from the fountain of the Virgin in the valley of Jehoshaphat and crosses in a zigzag way the side of the rock of Ophel, the southern prolongation of the temple mountain. The name sent can therefore be explained in this sense: water brought from far. Or we may think, with Ewald, of the jet itself of the spring, that is of the intermittent fountain which feeds the reservoir (see Vol. I., p. 455). Or finally we may see herein the idea of a gift of Jehovah (Hengstenberg), springs being regarded in the East as gifts of God. In any case, this parenthesis has as its purpose to establish a relation between this spring celebrated by the prophet as the emblem of the Messianic salvation (the typical sent) and the sent one properly so-called who really brings this salvation.

As Franke remarks (p. 314), this case, being the only one in which Jesus rests upon the meaning of a name, must be explained by the circumstance that Isaiah had already brought the water of Siloam into connection with the salvation of which He recognized the accomplishment in Jesus.

Meyer and others explain this parenthesis by supposing that John saw prefigured in this name sent the sending of the blind man himself to Siloam. As if there were the least logical correspondence between this sending and the name of this reservoir; as if the name of sent were not above all the constant title of Jesus Himself in our Gospel. To get rid of this parenthesis which embarrassed him, Lucke had recourse, with hesitation, to the hypothesis of an interpolation. The Peschito actually omits these words. But this omission in a Syriac translation is very naturally explained, since the word translated belongs to that language.

According to the Alexandrian reading, we must translate in John 9:6: “He applied His clay to...” Weiss, to save this objectionable reading, proposes to refer the pronoun αὐτοῦ, not to Jesus, but to πτύσματος, the saliva: “He applied the clay of the saliva.” The fact is that here, as frequently, one must know how to free one's self from the prejudice which attributes to the Alexandrian text a kind of infallibility. The preposition of motion, εἰς, into, is used with the verb νίψαι, wash, probably because the blind man was obliged to go down into the reservoir. Meyer explains the εἰς, by mentioning that in washing, the blind man would necessarily make the clay fall into the basin(!). It is a matter of course that the blind man found a guide among the persons present. How can Reuss make a charge against the narrative on the point of this omission? The evangelist says: He returned seeing; this signifies, no doubt, that the blind man returned to the place where he had left Jesus that he might render thanks to Him, and that, not finding Him there, Jesus was only passing by (John 9:1), he returned to his dwelling. This appears, indeed, from the following expression (John 9:8): the neighbors, as well as from John 9:35; John 9:37. Reuss: “We are not told where the man went after having washed, why he did not return to his benefactor...” What is to be said of such criticism?