A Woman at the Well
Chapter 4; Seven hundred years of bad blood at Jacob's well
Where this chapter sits
See the full timeline →Right now: Jesus is baptized and his public ministry begins (AD 28)
Setting: Samaria (Jacob's Well), then Cana
By Bea Zalel
John 4
Read in NIV →- When Jesus realized that the Pharisees were aware He was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John
- (although it was not Jesus who baptized, but His disciples),
- He left Judea and returned to Galilee.
- Now He had to pass through Samaria.
- So He came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
- Since Jacob's well was there, Jesus, weary from His journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.
- When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Give Me a drink."
- (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
- "You are a Jew," said the woman. "How can You ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
- Jesus answered, "If you knew the gift of God and who is asking you for a drink, you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water."
- "Sir," the woman replied, "You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where then will You get this living water?
- Are You greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock?"
- Jesus said to her, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again.
- But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a fount of water springing up to eternal life."
- The woman said to Him, "Sir, give me this water so that I will not get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water."
- Jesus told her, "Go, call your husband and come back."
- "I have no husband," the woman replied. Jesus said to her, "You are correct to say that you have no husband.
- In fact, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. You have spoken truthfully."
- "Sir," the woman said, "I see that You are a prophet.
- Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews say that the place where one must worship is in Jerusalem."
- "Believe Me, woman," Jesus replied, "a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
- You worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.
- But a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such as these to worship Him.
- God is Spirit, and His worshipers must worship Him in spirit and in truth."
- The woman said, "I know that Messiah" (called Christ) "is coming. When He comes, He will explain everything to us."
- Jesus answered, "I who speak to you am He."
- Just then His disciples returned and were surprised that He was speaking with a woman. But no one asked Him, "What do You want from her?" or "Why are You talking with her?"
- Then the woman left her water jar, went back into the town, and said to the people,
- "Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?"
- So they left the town and made their way toward Jesus.
- Meanwhile the disciples urged Him, "Rabbi, eat something."
- But He told them, "I have food to eat that you know nothing about."
- So the disciples asked one another, "Could someone have brought Him food?"
- Jesus explained, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to finish His work.
- Do you not say, 'There are still four months until the harvest'? I tell you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are ripe for harvest.
- Already the reaper draws his wages and gathers a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may rejoice together.
- For in this case the saying 'One sows and another reaps' is true.
- I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done the hard work, and now you have taken up their labor."
- Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in Jesus because of the woman's testimony, "He told me everything I ever did."
- So when the Samaritans came to Him, they asked Him to stay with them, and He stayed two days.
- And many more believed because of His message.
- They said to the woman, "We now believe not only because of your words; we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man truly is the Savior of the world."
- After two days, Jesus left for Galilee.
- Now He Himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.
- Yet when He arrived, the Galileans welcomed Him. They had seen all the great things He had done in Jerusalem at the feast, for they had gone there as well.
- So once again He came to Cana in Galilee, where He had turned the water into wine. And there was a royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum.
- When he heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went and begged Him to come down and heal his son, who was about to die.
- Jesus said to him, "Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will never believe."
- "Sir," the official said, "come down before my child dies."
- "Go," said Jesus. "Your son will live." The man took Jesus at His word and departed.
- And while he was still on the way, his servants met him with the news that his boy was alive.
- So he inquired as to the hour when his son had recovered, and they told him, "The fever left him yesterday at the seventh hour."
- Then the father realized that this was the very hour in which Jesus had told him, "Your son will live." And he and all his household believed.
- This was now the second sign that Jesus performed after coming from Judea into Galilee.
Inline text: Berean Standard Bible (BSB), public domain. Compare with the John 4 chapter in your preferred translation via the link above.
Theme
When the Samaritan woman says "how is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria," she is understating a feud that is roughly seven hundred years old. In 722 BCE the Assyrian empire deported the northern kingdom of Israel and resettled the land with foreign peoples. 2 Kings 17:24-31 lists by name the gods they brought with them, from Succoth-benoth of the Babylonians to Nibhaz and Tartak of the Avvites. Over the following centuries a Samaritan religion took shape. It accepted only the first five books of the Bible as scripture and it built its temple on Mount Gerizim instead of Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Then in 110 BCE a Jewish Hasmonean king named John Hyrcanus marched north and destroyed the Samaritan temple on Gerizim. That wound was still bleeding in Jesus's day, two centuries later. Jewish travelers from Galilee to Jerusalem regularly crossed the Jordan River twice in order to detour around Samaria rather than walk through it. The reader meets the woman inside a hatred that began long before she was born.
Jacob's well sits at the foot of Mount Gerizim near the modern city of Nablus. You can still visit it. Both Jewish and Samaritan tradition trace the site back to Genesis 33:18-20, where Jacob bought a field from the sons of Hamor and pitched his tent. It is shared sacred ground, one of the rare landmarks that both peoples claim without arguing about it. Jesus chooses this site on purpose. For a Jewish reader, the well is the patriarch's well, the proper place, the right side of the family memory. For a Samaritan reader, the same well is our well, our father Jacob, our ground. Brown points out that John keeps choosing locations that mean something to both audiences at once. The geography itself is doing theological work before anyone speaks. By sitting on the wall of Jacob's well, Jesus places himself in the one square meter of disputed land where Jew and Samaritan could agree. Then he begins the conversation that crosses every other line.
She comes to the well at noon. Respectable women in a village this size drew water at dawn or dusk in groups. The morning hour was social and safe. The noon hour, in the heat, was for the shamed and the outcast. The detail tells the audience something about her standing before a word is spoken. Then come the five husbands. The literal reading takes the number at face value. She has been widowed or divorced or both, more than once, in a world where infant mortality ran 30 to 50 percent and adult mortality from infection, childbirth or violence took husbands routinely. Women had no power to begin a divorce and almost no way to support themselves outside marriage. The symbolic reading, which Lincoln among others defends, hears the five husbands as an echo of the five foreign gods imported into Samaria in 2 Kings 17. Both readings are defensible and the chapter probably wants both at once. She is at once a particular shamed woman and a figure of her people's long mixing of foreign worship with the worship of the God of Israel.
"Give me a drink." Four ordinary words that break at least three rules at once. Honor-shame norms forbade a Jewish rabbi from speaking publicly with a strange woman, much less alone. The Mishnah, in a section called Avot 1:5, warns "do not talk too much with a woman." Some rabbinic commentary extends the warning even to a man's own wife. The cultural pressure on a man like Jesus to avoid this conversation was real. The shock the disciples show in verse 27 is the appropriate cultural reaction. The woman is also a Samaritan, which puts her outside the Pharisees' rules for ritual purity. By some readings, drinking from her water jar would have rendered Jesus ceremonially unclean. He starts the conversation on the wrong side of the purity rules and he stays there. A Gentile reader hears a different scandal in the same line. He has been raised inside Greco-Roman courtesy, where a man of standing does not ask a favor from a woman of no standing. In both audiences the social wiring is being crossed.
Now watch how John brackets the chapter. The Samaritan woman runs back to her village. She leaves her water jar behind. An entire Samaritan town comes out to Jesus and stays for two days. The text is explicit. She is the agent of their faith. In narrative terms she is the first evangelist in John. Right after this scene, in verses 46-54, Jesus is back in Cana and a "royal official," almost certainly a Gentile working for Herod Antipas's court at Capernaum, trusts him to heal his son at a distance and his whole household believes. John has bracketed the chapter so that the first two non-disciple conversions in the gospel belong to a Samaritan woman and a Gentile official. He is making the universal reach of the gospel concrete before any speech announces it. Keener notes the deliberate inversion. The people the original readers would have expected to come to faith last are the people who get there first.
Supporting cross-references
Discussion questions
- Sit with the seven hundred years of Jewish-Samaritan history before Jesus speaks a word at the well. How does the conversation feel different when you know that a Jewish king had destroyed the Samaritan temple about two centuries earlier and the wound was still raw?
- Read Genesis 33:18-20 and look up Jacob's well in modern Nablus. What does it mean that Jesus chooses one of the few pieces of geography both Jews and Samaritans claim as family ground for this particular encounter?
- Hold the two readings of the five husbands together. A widowed and discarded woman in a world with no economic options; a figure of Samaria's long mixing of foreign worship with the worship of the God of Israel. Which reading helps you hear the chapter more honestly? What is gained by refusing to choose?
- Imagine you are one of the disciples returning to find your rabbi alone with a Samaritan woman, asking her for a drink from her jar. Which rule does his question break first for you: gender, ethnicity or ritual purity?
- John brackets the chapter with a Samaritan woman and a Gentile official as the first two non-disciple converts. Why do you think the gospel writer places the universal reach of his message in those two specific bodies before any speech announces it?
Further reading
- Jewish Encyclopedia entry on SamaritansPublic-domain reference; clean summary of the 722 BCE deportation, the Gerizim temple, and the Hasmonean destruction of 110 BCE.
- The Gospel According to John, Volume 1 (Anchor Bible)— Raymond E. BrownEspecially good on the geography of Jacob's well and the shared sacred memory underneath the dialogue.
- The Gospel of John: A Commentary, Volume 1— Craig KeenerMassive social-historical commentary; notes the inversion that Samaritan woman and Gentile official are John's first non-disciple converts.
- John for Everyone, Part 1— N. T. WrightAccessible reading that keeps the cultural distance visible without flattening the woman into a modern type.
- Mishnah Avot 1:5The rabbinic saying "do not talk too much with a woman." Worth reading in context rather than as a slogan; helps explain the disciples' shock in verse 27.