To FEEL, grope, HANDLE — to touch by feeling for, the verb of a blind man's hands or of groping in the dark. ⚠ 1 John opens the letter with it, at the top of a rising chain of the senses: 'that which we have heard, seen with our eyes, looked upon, and our hands HANDLED (epsēlaphēsan), concerning the word of life' (1:1). It is a deliberately physical word, and a pointed one — it is the risen Christ's own: 'HANDLE me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have' (Luke 24:39). Against the secessionists who denied that the divine Christ had truly come in the flesh (the docetic error the whole letter fights), the writer stakes his testimony on touch: the Word of life was felt under his hands, no phantom. Elsewhere the Greek Old Testament uses it of Isaac's blind groping to feel Jacob (Genesis 27:12) and of men groping at noon as in the dark (Deuteronomy 28:29). KJV 'handled'; NIV 'touched'; NWT 'felt with our hands'. → first discussed at 1 John 1:1