An Impossible Conversation: Jesus and the Woman at the Well (Part One)

Jesus and the betrothal-at-a-well pattern

Jan 17, 2024

In the last post, we looked at how the patriarchs of the Old Testament sometimes met their wives at a well in a certain literary pattern of events. In the case of Isaac and Rebekah (Genesis 24), Jacob and Rachel (Genesis 29), and Moses and Zipporah (Exodus 2), these six steps played out each time:

Someone goes on a journey
A man meets a woman at a well
Water is drawn from the well
The woman runs home to bring news of the visitor
The visitor stays in the community and food is shared
The two parties are joined as one.

[For more on the wives-at-wells pattern, read Carissa Quinn’s post at BibleProject.]

Each step in this pattern also plays out in Jesus’ meeting with the Samaritan woman in John 4.

But before we go there, we need to look at the context of this incredible conversation.

The Passage

The story begins in John 4 by setting the scene:

Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. And he had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.
A woman from Samaria came to draw water…

Picture her there.

It was the heat of the day. She planned to come at a time when no one would be at the well, but when she arrived, someone was there. Worse yet, it was a man. Worse still, it was a Jew and a rabbi.

She stopped at a distance. She shaded her eyes and watched him sitting in the beneath the small awning over the well. She waited and weighed her options. Minutes passed until she finally decided to go get the water she came for. As she approached, she hardened herself for what might be a painful experience. She knew as a Jew, he had been taught to hate her people. She knew as a holy man, he would look down on her. She told herself, “At least he doesn’t know me. He probably won’t even speak to me or look at me.”

As she got nearer she kept her eyes down but she noticed him look up at her. In fact, he was staring. As the silence lengthened, his attention remained fixed on her. She prepared herself for any number of unpleasant interactions. But instead, when he spoke he said the last thing she would ever expect.

“Would you give me a drink?”

And suddenly we’re inside the betrothal-at-a-well pattern. Step one (“Someone goes on a journey”) and step two (“A man meets a woman at a well”) have come and gone and we are rounding the corner of step three.

His question is the last thing she expected, not only it echoed the words of Abraham’s servant when he went looking for a bride for Isaac in a foreign land. By the standards of the day the whole conversation is almost impossible.

The Barriers Between Them

The conversation is impossible because of the overwhelming cultural, historical, moral, and gender barriers between this Jewish male rabbi and the Samaritan woman of ill repute. You can see the barriers as she grapples with his unlikely gambit of asking for water and says, “How is it that you, a Jew (barrier), as for a drink from me, a woman (barrier) of Samaria (barrier)?”

But Jesus just plows right through the barriers as if they weren’t there.

During the whole conversation, it is she, not he, who has to be convinced to keep going, that she is safe, that something good is happening. Jesus’ posture reminds me of Hosea 2, where God says of wayward Israel,

“Behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.” (Hosea 2:14)

To see the distance Jesus must first overcome to speak his tender words, let’s look more closely at the barriers that stand between them. Here I am indebted to Jerram Barrs’ wonderful book Learning Evangelism From Jesus for its careful explanation of the cultural context of this passage.

Barrier One: A Jew and A Samaritan

It is difficult for us modern people to feel the weight of the open cultural enmity the Jews felt for the Samaritans.

Many of the messages we receive from our culture tell us to dismantle those kinds of impulses (or at least hide them). Today, we think prejudice is blameworthy, but our modern sensibilities would be almost incomprehensible to an ancient Jew, who instead felt that their hatred of the Samaritans was an important part of their own moral and cultural identity. The Jews even had a saying that if one met a Samaritan walking along the road one should walk into the ditch to avoid contact even between the two shadows.

Why did the Jews so abhor the Samaritans? The roots of that enmity lay in history.

Judea and Samaria had once been one kingdom under David and Solomon. After the reign of Solomon, the nation of Israel had split, becoming two nations: the southern kingdom of Judah, made up of people from the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem; and the northern kingdom of Israel, made up of people from the ten northern tribes, with its capital in Samaria.

In the eighth century BC, many of the people from the kingdom of Samaria were taken captive, after their defeat at the hands of the Assyrians, and resettled in far eastern parts of the Assyrian Empire (in the region of Iraq and Iran today).

Great numbers who had returned to Samaria after their years of exile, or who had remained in Samaria after Israel’s defeat, had intermarried with the other peoples that had been moved to Samaria. Their religion was a mix of practices from the books of Moses and those of the pagan Canaanites with whom they intermarried. To an ancient Israelite, this was worse than just being one of the nations to whom God’s law had never been given in the first place

The hostility between these two peoples was so great that in 128 BC, the Jews fought against the Samaritans and burned down their temple because they thought was such a horrible sacrilege. That very thing will happen to the temple in Jerusalem about 200 years later at the hands of the Romans.

And between the two burning temples came a nobody prophet from a backwater town walking around doing miracles, overturning paradigms, and telling people that a time is coming when people won’t worship on mountains, but in spirit and truth.

Barrier Two: A Man and a Woman

This brings us to the second barrier. Here is a quote from Jerram Barrs’ book Learning Evangelism From Jesus in which he reflects on this story:

“Why should it be considered a problem that the woman at the well is a woman? At that time, Jewish rabbis or teachers did not have women as disciples. Women were not allowed to be witnesses in court, for the rabbis considered women to be irrational and untrustworthy. In fact, there is said to have been a prayer of the Pharisees in which they thanked God that they were not Gentiles by praying, “Thank you God that I am not a Gentile, but a Jew; that I am not a slave, but am free; not a woman, but a man.”

In fact, all of society was built in a patriarchal framework that formed a hierarchy in which women did have a place, but only a subordinate place, a place that existed only in reference to the larger framework of men, fathers, and households. There was no concept of the liberated, independent woman. That is a modern anachronism that has no place in this story. To step outside of the patriarchal order was to tumble to the bottom of the heap, to become incredibly vulnerable and insecure. As this woman has done.

To illustrate this further, we need to fast forward a century to a time when the Christian movement had gained momentum and spread tenaciously through the underclasses, those who were marginalized and disempowered in Greco-Roman society. Christianity quickly gained enough momentum to attract the attention of enemies. One such enemy, a card-carrying member of the Roman patriarchy named Celsus wrote a book called The True Word in which he mocks Christianity at exactly this point:

“In some private homes we find people who work with rags… the least cultured and most ignorant kind of people… when the head of the household is around they dare not utter a word but as soon as they can take the children aside they speak about wonders…
So if you really wish to know the truth, leave your teachers and father and go to the tannery or the women’s quarters and you will learn about the perfect life… It is only there that Christians find those who will believe them.”

Celsus’ criticism didn’t age well.

He was mocking a concept we would now call something like “social justice,” the uplifting of the marginalized and downtrodden. But from the position of the priorities of the Roman patriarchy, it really did look ridiculous. The appeal of Christainity for the marginalized is an exact inversion of the Roman ideal of power and prestige.

Secondly, you can see why the message spread so far, so fast with marginalized people. The church collected to itself those the Greco-Roman uber-culture had cast off. The Christian message was so unbelievable by the standards of the day that, if it were true, it would almost be irresistible: that the kingdom of God wholly upends the kingdom of man. Christ ushered in a reality where the last are first and the first are last. You can see why “the last” flocked to the banner of a God like that.

And look, isn’t this exactly what is happening when Jesus meets the woman at the well? “Social justice” wasn’t a later invention of the underclass of new converts. It is just what it was like to be around Jesus.

This story is a perfect picture of the very thing Celsus was deriding and it started happening immediately. It wasn’t just that this was where Christians could find people who would believe them, but this was the mission itself. This is the very thing God spent his time doing when he took on flesh and walked around in the broken cultural milieu of his day.

And he is teaching the Samaritan woman too, even in the face of her very reasonable objections (“Why are you, a man, talking to me?”)

He arranged a private meeting with a woman at the very bottom of things, on her last thread, all but exiled from her community, shunned by everyone but sought out by God himself.

Barrier Three: A Rabbi and a Pariah

Let’s look at the third barrier, that of her sin. I’ll quote again from Jerram Barrs’ book Learning Evangelism From Jesus:

“Her sin is not the secret or ‘respectable’ kind; rather, this woman is known by all to be a sinner. She has been married five times and she is now living with a man outside of any marriage contract.”
Divorce, at that time, was fairly easy for men. If a man found another woman more to his liking, or if he found fault with a woman for any reason [he could set her aside]… Consequently, a woman divorced five times, like this woman at the well, has become a person who is despised by everyone. A man does not need to marry her to have her, for she is now a woman who can be passed from man to man until they tire of her…
This badge of dishonor meant that the Samaritan woman was unacceptable not only to Jews but even to her own people. That is probably why she is at this particular well some distance from town, alone, and at an unusual time of day. Most women would usually go to draw water in the cool early morning, or in the evening after the heat of the day had passed, and ordinarily they would go together, for this was a time for meeting friends and for social interaction with one’s neighbors. But this woman is at the well by herself in the full heat of the day.”

This woman has basically been passed around by the men in her community. She is expendable. In her desperation, her terrible situation has a kind of perverse equilibrium. She has found one last place with a man who does not even have to give her the dignity of marrying her. She can just be his live-in woman.

What other options does she have? There is a way that things are done, a script, a path, and she has strayed far from it. She has found a small place for herself along the back roads, out in the hot sun, on the underside of things.

And who should she meet in the midst of her lonely, broken, neglected, deeply wounded routine, but the God of all the universe who waits for her and asks her for a drink?

In the Old Testament law, the Hebrews learned to keep themselves pure by separating themselves from sources of impurity. There was the idea that the impurity could jump into you if you got near enough. There were special purifications you had to do if you, say, were menstruating, touched something dead, or got a skin disease. You had to wash, offer sacrifices, and perform other rituals of cleansing before you could rejoin the normal rhythms of life or enter a holy place. If you touched someone before you did those purifications, they had to go do them too as if your impurity was contagious.

But Jesus once again inverts the paradigm. Jesus is completely pure; he is God in flesh. Things don’t make him unclean. He makes things clean.

When Jesus touched a leper, he didn’t become impure, the leper was cleansed. When a woman with incurable bleeding touched the hem of his robe in a crown, Jesus didn’t have to go offer sacrifices, she was made well. Jesus was purity-made flesh and was on a mission of purification.

However, when Purity himself walked around in the world, it didn’t look like people thought it would. Jesus was not withdrawn and judgmental and punishing. He was gentle and kind and enigmatically, surprisingly loving. As Jesus himself said when he was busy scandalizing the religious elite by hanging out with the very people they liked to look down on, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5)

So when this moral outcast comes up to the well, he doesn’t shuffle away from her like everyone else. He doesn’t sneer at her. He asks her for a drink. He asks her to use her hands to draw water that he will take into his body.

And it is in this context that Jesus gives his wedding proposal

Despite all of these barriers, they are still within the betrothal-at-a-well pattern, which means that at the end of this conversation, we would expect to see a betrothal. And that is exactly what happens, but the betrothal involves a different kind of bride, a different kind of groom, and a different kind of wedding.

First, let’s revisit the movements of the pattern to see how each one fits into this story:

Someone goes on a journey.
Jesus and the Samaritan woman have both gone on a journey: she to the well to draw water alone and he into Samaritan land to meet her.
A man meets a woman at a well.'
Jesus sent his disciples away so that the two of them could have this meeting alone. You can imagine how her experience of meeting the messiah might have been different if they had had this very intimate conversation with Jesus’ twelve male friends hanging around.
Water is drawn from the well.
The conversation begins with well water but moves on to a different kind of water.
The woman runs home to bring news of the visitor.
In this case, the Samaritan woman becomes an ambassador to her whole village. Because of her encounter with the messiah, the very things that caused her communal shame are now where her story about Jesus starts. “He told me everything I ever did!”
The visitor stays in the community and food is shared
Just as she is leaving, the other disciples return, bringing the food they were sent away to gather. They urge him to eat but he tells them that he has already eaten. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me.”
The two parties are joined as one.
The Samaritan woman’s report intrigues her fellow villages and they come to hear Jesus and “many from the town believe in him.”

This isn’t strictly a wedding proposal, but also, it is. Jesus is called “the groom” in Mark 2:18–20 and John 3:27-29. He is, in a sense, proposing to her whole village, and, to take the image to its fullest extent, to all of creation. Perhaps this story was in Paul’s mind when he compared Christ’s relationship with the church to that of a husband with his wife in Ephesians 5?

The Living Water

There is something funny about this conversation that we haven’t talked about yet. Though he asks her for water, she never actually gives him any. In the end, he ends up offering her a different kind of water, living water.

He said, “Everyone who drinks of this will be thirsty again. But not with my water… To drink my water is to live forever.”

And though the conversation started with him asking her for a drink, she eventually asked him for one. “OK. Give me some of that water… that way I won’t have to haul myself out here every day.”

But what is the living water? How is it different than the water in the well? How does Jesus give it to her? Has the living water shown up anywhere else in the Bible already? And why does it make a person live forever?

We will turn to all of those questions in the next post.