I was trying to figure out how greek snaring and latin mousetraps moved to english 'blocks'. I can't demonstrate the veracity of this quote, but it's the closest decent explanation:
The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word Origins
STUMBLING BLOCK: William Tyndale apparently coined this expression when he translated Romans14:13 into English for his Bible in 1534, the version that fixed the tone and style of the English BIBLE. In Romans, Paul of Tarsus had written that a good Christian should not put a ‘skandalon’ in his brother’s path. Since the ‘skandalon,’ a kind of hunting trap, was unfamiliar to Englishmen of the time, Tyndale changed the word to ‘stumbling block’ making Paul’s phrase “that no man put a ‘stomblinge blocke’ ……in his brother’s way.” The translator may have invented the term, or it may have been suggested to him by the earlier (1450) phrase ‘to ‘stumble at a block’ (a tree stump), but in any case ‘stumbling block’ quickly became an expression for an obstacle of any kind.
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In another article, a querier asked, did Israelites really make a habit of tripping blind people, thus requiring special instructions (thus Lev's special prohibition). The answerer went through the Talmud logic sequence, where I got lost.
