John Lightfoot on Luke 1:22

[He beckoned unto them.] There is also, verse 62, they made signs. The deaf and dumb man, he nods to them, and they nod to him.

The Talmudists distinguish the judgments given by a dumb man into the nodding of the head, and the dumb man's making signs.

"If any person be dumb, and yet hath his understanding, should they say to him, May we write a bill of divorce to thy wife, and he nod with his head, they make the experiment upon him three times," &c. And a little after they do not much rely upon the signs of the deaf and dumb man. For as it is in the same place, the dumb person, and the deaf and dumb, differ. Gloss: "The one can hear and not speak; the other can neither hear nor speak."

Amongst the doctors, the deaf and dumb person is commonly looked upon as one made so by some fit of palsy or apoplexy, by which the intellectuals are generally affected: whence the deaf and dumb are, according to the traditional canons, deprived of several offices and privileges of which others are capable.

This case therefore of Zacharias might have occasioned a considerable question, whether he ought not to have been sequestered from his ministry, and deprived of all the privileges of his priesthood, because he had been struck deaf and dumb, but that it happened to him in so signal and extraordinary a way.