God heard the cry of the boy, and an angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, "What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heeded the cry of the boy where he is. Come, lift up the boy and hold him by the hand, for I will make a great nation of him." Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water, and let the boy drink. (Gen 21:17-19, 1985 JPS Tanakh)
Using this text as a “kick-off point” for a discussion on the Old Testament affirming there being more than one type of “seeing,” James L. Kugel writes:
Why should the narrative have said that God opened her eyes? Minutes earlier, she seemed to be wandering around in the wasteland with nothing to drink. Now an angel calls to Hagar from heaven and tells her that everything will be all right and that, in fact, God has destined her son for greatness. Then God Himself opens her eyes and she suddenly sees a well that will save her life along with that of her son. Why didn’t she see it before? Nothing in the text implies that she ten had to dig the well, or that God led her to some previously hidden opening in the ground. Apparently the well was in plain sight all along. In fact, the text had earlier mentioned that Hagar put her son “under one of the bushes” because she couldn’t stand to witness his death. But didn’t she know that bushes, especially bushes in the scorched wilderness, must have some source of water to survive, and that such a source must therefore be somewhere very close by? If so, why did God have to open her eyes? And by the way, were they really closed?
In numerous places in the Bible, the text seems to go out of its way to assert that there is a special kind of seeing associated with divine encounters. It is as if people think that their eyes are perceiving things, but this is just an optical illusion. That is why, in a divine vision, people often seem to be in some kind of fog (as Hagar apparently is here): the most obvious things seem to escape their attention. After a while, however, they catch on; suddenly they realize that this is a divine encounter, that their eyes are really not functioning normally, and what they think they are seeing they are not seeing at all. That is why God has to “open” Hagar’s eyes afterwards: He has to switch her vision from the special to the regular sort of seeing in order for her to perceive what was right in from of her all along.
This special kind of seeing is often marked as such in the Bible. One day, sitting outside his tent, Abraham sees three men approaching. Notice, however, the Bible’s wording:
Now the LORD appeared to him by the terebinths of Mamre, while he was sitting at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. And he lifted up his eyes and he saw, and behold! Three men were standing near him and he saw; and he ran from the tent door toward them and bowed down low.” (Gen 18:1-2)
The first sentence describes to the reader what really happened: the LORD appeared to Abraham. But that isn’t what Abraham saw, so the text stresses the fact that he was seeing in a different mode: “He lifted up his eyes and he saw, and behold! . . . and he saw . . .” This vision carries on for a while: Abraham prepares an elaborate meal for his three guests, then watches them eat, or at least thinks that that is what he is seeing. (But every ancient Israelite knew that angels cannot eat.) “Where is your wife Sarah” they ask—but how do these strangers know his wife’s name? The whole thing is like a dream, except that Abraham seems to be wide awake.
Then He said, “I will return I a year’s time, and your wife Sarah will have a son.” Sarah had been listening at the door of the tent, which was in back of him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, well advanced in years; Sarah had stopped having the periods what women have. So Sarah laughed to herself: “After I am all worn out, will I still have relations—not to mention that my husband is old too!” Then the LORD said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Can I really give birth, old as I am?’ Is anything too much for the LORD? In a year’s time I will be back, and Sarah will have a son.” (Gen 18:10-14)
It is important to pay close attention to the words. The whole section is being told to us from the point of view of the narrative: the text is saying that this is really God speaking to Abraham. But Abraham and Sarah don’t know this: they are still in a fog—as they will be until the end. (James L. Kugel, The Great Shift: Encountering God in Biblical Times [New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017], 4-6, italics in original)
Such should be of interest to Latter-day Saints, especially when it comes to the issue of early Latter-day Saints (e.g., Martin Harris) and their use of “spiritual eyes” when it came to witnessing divine manifestations and other events (cf. my blog post "Spiritual Eyes" in pre-1830 literature).