Exodus 4:11 has Yahweh personally claim authorship over blindness, deafness, and muteness — they are direct acts of God. Mark 9:17-25, by contrast, treats deafness and muteness as the work of a foul spirit that Jesus exorcises, and John 9:1-3 treats congenital blindness as a setup for a divine demonstration rather than a curse to be undone. The Hebrew Bible's strict monotheistic etiology of disability collides with the Synoptic demonology that develops in the Second Temple period.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
God.
Blind and deaf people were purposely made by God.
Who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD?
Exodus 4:11
Some were made blind so that Jesus could show off by healing them.
And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master,
who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his
parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
John 9:1-3
1As he passed by, he saw a man blind from birth.2His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”3Jesus answered, “This man didn’t sin, nor did his parents; but, that the works of God might be revealed in him.
People are made blind and deaf by evil spirits.
And one of the multitude answered and said, Master, I have brought unto
thee my son, which hath a dumb spirit. Jesus ... rebuked the foul spirit, saying
unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him,
and enter no more into him. Mark 9:17, 25
17One of the multitude answered, “Teacher, I brought to you my son, who has a mute spirit;25When Jesus saw that a multitude came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to him, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again!”
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Exodus 4:11 is unambiguous. Yahweh, overriding Moses' protest about his speech, asserts sole agency over sensory capacity and incapacity: "Who makes (sam, qal active participle of sim) a person mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, Yahweh?" There is no intermediary in the picture — no Satan, no demon, no foul spirit. The statement is framed as a universal etiological claim grounding Moses' commission: because Yahweh controls speech and the senses, he can equip Moses' mouth. This fits what John Collins describes as the strongly monistic theology running through much of the Hebrew Bible, in which Yahweh is the single causal source of both weal and woe. The same theology speaks in Isaiah 45:7 ("I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I, Yahweh, do all these things") and Amos 3:6 ("Does disaster befall a city, unless Yahweh has done it?"). In this frame disability is not the work of a rival power; it is within Yahweh's direct authorship.
By the time of Mark the causal universe has been repopulated. Mark 9:25 names the spirit directly — to alalon kai kōphon pneuma, "the mute and deaf spirit" — and Jesus commands it to come out and enter the boy no more. The disability is not merely afflicted by the spirit; in Mark's idiom the spirit is characterized by, and produces, the muteness and deafness, and removing the spirit removes the condition. This is characteristic Second Temple demonology, a development largely absent from the older strata of the Hebrew Bible and well attested in the literature of the intertestamental period: the Watcher myth and origin of evil spirits in 1 Enoch 15-16, the demonology of Jubilees, and the exorcistic and apotropaic texts from Qumran (e.g., 4Q560, 11Q11). Archie Wright traces how Genesis 6:1-4 was reread to generate a population of malevolent spirits responsible for human affliction — a conceptual shift that gives the Synoptic exorcism narratives their causal backdrop. Joel Marcus, in the Anchor Yale Mark, situates the chapter 9 episode squarely within this framework.
The harmonizing response is to treat these as different cases: God authors some conditions, demons cause others, and Exodus 4:11 and Mark 9 simply describe distinct instances with no logical conflict. Stated fairly, this is not unreasonable on its own — the New Testament does not deny divine sovereignty, and one could hold that God permits or even ordains what demons execute (the Joban model of mediated affliction). The difficulty is that Exodus 4:11 is not phrased as a case-by-case attribution. It is a sweeping rhetorical claim of authorship — "Is it not I, Yahweh?" — deployed precisely to assert that no other agent stands behind speech or the senses. To then introduce an independent demonic etiology for the same class of conditions is to qualify a claim the Exodus text frames as unqualified. The two texts reflect different theological worlds, not two halves of one coherent doctrine of disability.
John 9:1-3 supplies a third etiology that resists assimilation to either of the first two. The disciples assume a Deuteronomic retributive model — someone sinned, the man or his parents — and Jesus rejects it outright: "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God might be revealed in him." That is neither the direct-divine-authorship claim of Exodus (the man's blindness is not presented as Yahweh's punitive or creative act) nor the demonological frame of Mark (no spirit is named); it is a teleological reframing in which a congenital condition exists to become the occasion of a revelatory sign. Raymond Brown notes that John here explicitly sets aside the retributive theology of suffering. Three texts, three different accounts of why a person cannot see or hear: sovereign divine making, demonic affliction, and providential staging of a sign.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine theological development across the corpus, not a single coherent doctrine; the case-by-case harmonization founders on the universal phrasing of Exodus 4:11.
Sources for this reading
John J. Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Fortress, 2018) pp. 119-122on divine sole agency in Exodus
William H. C. Propp, Exodus 1-18 (AB 2; Doubleday, 1999) pp. 213-215on Exodus 4:11Exodus 4:11
Joel Marcus, Mark 8-16 (AYB 27A; Yale University Press, 2009) pp. 652-661on Mark 9:14-29Mark 9:14-29
Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (I-XII) (AB 29; Doubleday, 1966) pp. 371-376on John 9:1-3John 9:1-3
Archie T. Wright, The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6.1-4 in Early Jewish Literature (WUNT 2/198; Mohr Siebeck, 2005) on demonic causation in Second Temple Judaism
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
Exodus 4:11 is unambiguous. Yahweh, overriding Moses' protest about his speech, asserts sole agency over sensory capacity and incapacity: "Who makes (sam, qal active participle of sim) a person mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, Yahweh?" There is no intermediary in the picture — no Satan, no demon, no foul spirit. The statement is framed as a universal etiological claim grounding Moses' commission: because Yahweh controls speech and the senses, he can equip Moses' mouth. This fits what John Collins describes as the strongly monistic theology running through much of the Hebrew Bible, in which Yahweh is the single causal source of both weal and woe. The same theology speaks in Isaiah 45:7 ("I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I, Yahweh, do all these things") and Amos 3:6 ("Does disaster befall a city, unless Yahweh has done it?"). In this frame disability is not the work of a rival power; it is within Yahweh's direct authorship.
By the time of Mark the causal universe has been repopulated. Mark 9:25 names the spirit directly — to alalon kai kōphon pneuma, "the mute and deaf spirit" — and Jesus commands it to come out and enter the boy no more. The disability is not merely afflicted by the spirit; in Mark's idiom the spirit is characterized by, and produces, the muteness and deafness, and removing the spirit removes the condition. This is characteristic Second Temple demonology, a development largely absent from the older strata of the Hebrew Bible and well attested in the literature of the intertestamental period: the Watcher myth and origin of evil spirits in 1 Enoch 15-16, the demonology of Jubilees, and the exorcistic and apotropaic texts from Qumran (e.g., 4Q560, 11Q11). Archie Wright traces how Genesis 6:1-4 was reread to generate a population of malevolent spirits responsible for human affliction — a conceptual shift that gives the Synoptic exorcism narratives their causal backdrop. Joel Marcus, in the Anchor Yale Mark, situates the chapter 9 episode squarely within this framework.
The harmonizing response is to treat these as different cases: God authors some conditions, demons cause others, and Exodus 4:11 and Mark 9 simply describe distinct instances with no logical conflict. Stated fairly, this is not unreasonable on its own — the New Testament does not deny divine sovereignty, and one could hold that God permits or even ordains what demons execute (the Joban model of mediated affliction). The difficulty is that Exodus 4:11 is not phrased as a case-by-case attribution. It is a sweeping rhetorical claim of authorship — "Is it not I, Yahweh?" — deployed precisely to assert that no other agent stands behind speech or the senses. To then introduce an independent demonic etiology for the same class of conditions is to qualify a claim the Exodus text frames as unqualified. The two texts reflect different theological worlds, not two halves of one coherent doctrine of disability.
John 9:1-3 supplies a third etiology that resists assimilation to either of the first two. The disciples assume a Deuteronomic retributive model — someone sinned, the man or his parents — and Jesus rejects it outright: "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God might be revealed in him." That is neither the direct-divine-authorship claim of Exodus (the man's blindness is not presented as Yahweh's punitive or creative act) nor the demonological frame of Mark (no spirit is named); it is a teleological reframing in which a congenital condition exists to become the occasion of a revelatory sign. Raymond Brown notes that John here explicitly sets aside the retributive theology of suffering. Three texts, three different accounts of why a person cannot see or hear: sovereign divine making, demonic affliction, and providential staging of a sign.
Where the critical reading lands: genuine theological development across the corpus, not a single coherent doctrine; the case-by-case harmonization founders on the universal phrasing of Exodus 4:11.
Sources for this reading