Matthew Chapter 15 verse 14 Holy Bible
Let them alone: they are blind guides. And if the blind guide the blind, both shall fall into a pit.
read chapter 15 in ASV
Let them be: they are blind guides. And if a blind man is guiding a blind man, the two will go falling into a hole together.
read chapter 15 in BBE
Leave them alone; they are blind leaders of blind: but if blind lead blind, both will fall into a ditch.
read chapter 15 in DARBY
Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.
read chapter 15 in KJV
read chapter 15 in WBT
Leave them alone. They are blind guides of the blind. If the blind guide the blind, both will fall into a pit."
read chapter 15 in WEB
let them alone, guides they are -- blind of blind; and if blind may guide blind, both into a ditch shall fall.'
read chapter 15 in YLT
Pulpit Commentary
Pulpit CommentaryVerse 14. - Let them alone. Do not trouble yourselves about them; let them be offended, if they will. Blind leaders of the blind. Both teachers and taught are alike ignorant of the truth. The people had no spiritual light, and, applying to their appointed pastors, they learned nothing profitable from them; for these were as much in the dark as themselves. It was evident, then, that the rabbis ought not to be followed unreservedly. If the blind. A proverbial saying. Comp. Horat., 'Epp.,' I, 17:3 - "... ut siCaecus iter monstrare velit." And the Greek adage, Μήτε τυφλὸν ὁδηγόν, μήτε ἐκνόητον σύμβουλον. Nosgen calls attention to the order of the words, Τυφλὸς δὲ τυφλὸν ἐὰν ὁδηγῇ, "Blind blind if he lead," which, while it substantiates the advice, "Let them alone," forcibly expresses the fatal result of this guidance. The ditch (βόθυνον); a pitfall (comp. Isaiah 24:17, 18, Septuagint, where it is used as the translation of the Hebrew pachath, a pit in which wild animals are taken). The "ditch" in one sense is unbelief in Christ, to which rabbinical teaching undoubtedly led. In another sense it adumbrates the ruin in which these false principles would involve the Jewish polity and people. It is obvious that the rejection of the Messiah drew down the punishment which has made the Hebrew nation an astonishment to all the world.
Ellicott's Commentary
Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(14) They be blind leaders of the blind.--It would appear from Romans 2:19 that the phrase was one in common use to describe the ideal of the Rabbi's calling. Now they heard it in a new form, which told them that their state was the very reverse of that ideal. And that which was worst in it was that their blindness was self-chosen (Matthew 13:15), and that they were yet all unconscious of it, and boasted that they saw (John 9:41).If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.--The proverb was probably a familiar one (it is given in St. Luke 6:39 as part of the Sermon on the Plain), but, as now spoken, it had the character of a prophecy. We have but to read the Jewish historian's account of the years that preceded the destruction of Jerusalem to see what the "ditch" was towards which teachers and people were alike blindly hastening. Bitter sectarianism, and wild dreams, and baseless hopes, and maddened zeal, and rejection of the truth which alone had power to save them, this was the issue which both were preparing for themselves, and from which there was no escape.
