The Woman at the Well

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee

(The Destruction of Sennacherib by Lord Byron)

Well the Assyrian came down on Israel in 722 BC, and when the carnage was over, the northern ten tribes simply ceased to exist as a nation. The Assyrians, unskilled in the intricacies of colonial administration, practiced the politics of deportation. They moved and resettled their conquered victims, moving other peoples into the land in their place on the theory that if you kept people off balance and struggling merely to survive, they could not rebel.

So it was recorded in the book of Second Kings, chapter 17 that…

…the king of Assyria captured Samaria and deported the Israelites to Assyria. He settled them in Halah, in Gozan on the Habor River and in the towns of the Medes. The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites. They took over Samaria and lived in its towns.

Actually, King Sargon left records which tell us that he deported 27,000 Israelites - mainly the upper class, the intelligentsia. The peasants he left behind, and over the years they began to intermarry with the foreigners who had moved in. The resulting mixed race became the Samaritans; a half-breed people who worshiped the God of Israel, but not according to the teaching of the Old Testament.

Naturally, the true Jews who were left in the nation Judah looked with disdain on their unfortunate cousins to the north. And when Judah’s turn came to go into exile a century and a half later, relations soured even further. For when the Jews returned to Jerusalem from Babylon following their seventy years of captivity, they wanted to rebuild their Temple. The Samaritans made a generous offer to help, but the Jews abruptly rejected it. The Samaritans, in a huff, decided to build their own temple on Mt. Gerizim, where they practiced a bastardized form of OT worship. And when the Jews then set out to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls under Nehemiah, the Samaritans tried every possible means to derail the project.

So it went between the two peoples for the next three hundred years until the year 128 BC. The nation Judah had by that time gained a measure of independence and under John Hyrcanus, a member of the Maccabees family, they conquered the Samaritans and destroyed their detestable temple on Mt. Gerizim. Naturally, this served to drive the wedge between Samaritan and Jew even deeper so that by the time of Jesus, there was a simmering hatred between the two cousins.

Further complicating matters was that the Jews had settled Galilee, so that Samaria now lay between the region of Judea to the south, where the city of Jerusalem lay, and Galilee to the north. This unhappy geographical sandwich guaranteed that there would be constant friction between the two groups. The religious Jews who had to travel between Jerusalem and Galilee fell into the habit of taking a long and extended detour on the eastern side of the Jordan River, simply to avoid having to travel through Samaria. They felt that any contact whatsoever with Samaritans would defile them. In fact, Rabbi Eliezer wrote in the Talmud “He that eats the bread of the Samaritans is like to one that eats the flesh of swine.” The Jewish apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus refers to the Samaritans as the “foolish people who live in Shechem, and the Testimony of Levi calls Shechem “a city of fools”. In other words, the Samaritans were about as well thought of as a ham sandwich at a Bar Mitzvah.

The Samaritans, for their part, refused to offer hospitality to a Jew traveling through their territory - a radical gesture, since the virtue hospitality was a high priority in all Middle Eastern cultures. We see just a little of this interracial tension in…

Luke 9:52-54 And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?”

And when in the heat of an argument, the enemies of Jesus wanted to pin the worst possible label on him, they said…

John 8:48 …”Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?”

So that was how things were between Jews and Samaritans in the time of Jesus. (Incidentally, there are still Samaritans living today. They have a small community of several hundred people, very poor and backward, living in Nablus and Joffa in Israel. They cling to their traditions, they have several ancient scrolls of the Samaritan Pentateuch - the only part of the OT they accept, and they intermarry which over the years has led to a high incidence of mental degeneration.)

So it would be surprising for a Jew, when he came to John 4, to read that Jesus chose to go through Samaria on his way back to Galilee. Even more surprising to read that Jesus engaged a Samaritan woman in conversation as he stopped at Jacob’s well to rest at about noon one day. (By the way, Jacob’s well is one of the few genuine locations that you can visit in the Holy Land today. It is still there, and has been in constant use lo, these many thousand years.) It just wasn’t kosher for a Jewish rabbi to talk to a Samaritan, much less one of the female gender. Jewish rabbis weren’t even supposed to talk to their wives or daughters in public !

Another odd thing is that it was unusual to find anyone using the well at noon. The women of the Middle East usually drew their water at sundown, in the coolness of dusk. They didn’t want to come down the hill from the town of Sychar and then have to carry the water back up in the heat of the day. So only this one woman was there, and someone has suggested that it was because of the kind of woman she was, and the reputation she enjoyed in the town that she chose to go to the well when the other women weren’t there.

This woman herself was a little surprised that Jesus would address her, and she was even more surprised by his request. She answered him in a less than polite manner…

“You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?”

…and I’m sure that her words dripped with sarcasm. You see, to ask someone for a drink when you didn’t have your own drinking cup was to ask to use theirs. And that was something that no Jew in his right mind would ever do. For a Jew to put his lips on a cup that had been used by a Samaritan was to contract the worst sort of ceremonial uncleanness. She knew it and resented it. But it didn’t seem to bother Jesus, did it?

Look at how he piques her curiosity and invites her to talk further. He wasn’t discouraged by her initial rebuff…

John 4:10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

The woman is skeptical. Here’s a Jew who obviously has a few screws loose. He is talking to a woman, and not just any woman but a Samaritan woman. And not just any Samaritan woman but one whose reputation was, I’m sure, the talk of the town. You know how small towns are. And here he is claiming to have special water when he doesn’t even have a jug to draw with. So she asks him who he thinks he is… Does he think he is greater than Jacob who dug the well a thousand years before?

And again, Jesus is not rebuffed. He answers…

“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 spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Now he’s got her really interested. And as usual, when Jesus spoke about spiritual truth, people understood him to be talking about literal things. Just like Nicodemus, when Jesus told him he must be born again.

This woman is thinking how great it would be not to have to come down that long hill to this dumb well everyday. Not to have to tote the water back up to her house. Not to have to endure the leering looks of the men, and the whispered remarks of the women when she passed.

She said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Notice how her attitude has changed. Now she’s calling him “Sir”. But then out of a clear blue sky, Jesus drops a bombshell…

“Go, call your husband and come back.”

You can almost hear the door of her life slam shut, and the locks and bolts being turned. This guy has wandered into forbidden territory…

“I have no husband,” she replied.

Once again, Jesus is not put off…

He said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

What has Jesus done up to this point? Well he started this little encounter off with an innocent request. As a matter of fact, he put himself in a vulnerable position by asking the woman for a favor. He admitted that he had a need. Sometimes we Christians, if we’re ever going to build bridges to non-Christians, are going to have to make ourselves vulnerable. We’re going to have to be willing to admit that they have something to offer us, not just that we have something to offer them. This is really the only way to build respect and trust and a sense of equality and friendship. Relationships are built when friendship is a two-way street. So don’t be afraid to let your neighbor minister to you. Don’t be afraid to admit that you are not self-sufficient, and independent. Don’t be afraid to ask your non-Christian friend for some help, or some advice, or some instruction. He’ll respect you the more for it, and your friendship will grow.

Jesus has patiently taken this woman from talking about trivial things to the brink of revealing all the heartache of her life, her need, and her pain. Watch what happens next…

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Someone has said that “theology is the first recourse of the person who is convicted of sin.” When you talk to people about Christ, don’t be surprised if they throw a few red herrings in your path. I remember sharing the gospel with a man in his living room one day. As the conversation zeroed in on his need to receive Jesus Christ as his Savior, and as I asked him if he would like to do that right then, he said he had one more question. His question… “Where did Cain get his wife?”

A person who is under the Holy Spirit’s conviction of sin will do just about anything to get off the hook. They will offer the most trivial excuses like “the church is full of hypocrites”, or they’ll try to start theological arguments like “what is God going to do with people who have never heard of Jesus?”, or they’ll ask the most annoying questions like “why are there so many different denominations?” You see, sin is like a cornered animal. It doesn’t like to be exposed by the light of the Gospel and it will do anything to avoid the glare. That is why this woman said what she did about the Jewish-Samaritan controversy. Because arguing about religion is a safe way to avoid the Gospel. So don’t argue with people you are trying to win for Christ.

Jesus, in a nice way, tells her that her question is really irrelevant, to which she replies…

“I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

As far as she is concerned, that’s it. End of conversation. Can’t you see her pick up her water jug and turn to leave? But Jesus has one more thing to say to her…

“I who speak to you am he.”

Sooner or later, a person will meet Christ face to face. And when they do, there will be no mistaking who they’ve met, because it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to show them.

This woman left her water jar and walked…no, she ran back to town all the way up that long hill. And she went to the men of the town - I guess she wasn’t on speaking terms with the women - and she told them to come and meet a man who told her all about everything she’d ever done. Now I’ll grant you that the men of Sychar would be pretty interested in such a man, since some of them would have been co-stars in that story ! And came they did, and met Jesus, and they put their trust in Him as Savior too.

The world is full of people who are tired of drinking the waters of the wells of this earth. They have drunk at the well of success and found it’s water bitter; they have drunk at the well of pleasure and found its water stale. They have drunk at the well of riches and found it unrefreshing; they have drunk at the well of fame and found it could not quench.

Jesus said “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 spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

The water of eternal life that he gives us bubbles up within us; it is living water; refreshing water; clear, sparkling, joyful water. It is the only water that can quench the thirst of our souls.

When you put your faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, your life becomes a fountain, a place where not only you can find refreshment but others can as well. Does this describe your life today?

After the woman had left Jesus at the well to run back up the path to the town, Jesus spoke with his disciples about the harvest of souls for the kingdom. As he sat there talking with them, I like to think that he could see over their shoulders to the path that wound up the hillside to the town… a path which would at any moment be filled with townspeople coming down to the well in response to the woman’s story. And as he said to his disciples “Lift up your eyes and look at the fields ! They are ripe for harvest !” perhaps he was looking over their shoulders and urging them to turn and look up the hillside to the town to see the spectacle of a host of people, like dots in the distance, like ripe heads of grain in the fields, coming to meet the Messiah.