Why Do Men in the Bible Find Their Wives at Wells?

Betrothal-at-a-well stories in the Old Testament follow a certain pattern.

This is the eighth part of our series examining the image of water in the Bible. Over the next months, we’ll be looking at these verses to follow the image of water as it flows from Genesis to Revelation. This time we’ll look at a few scenes from the Old Testament in which the patriarchs find their future wives at wells.

---

In the arid landscape of the Near East, wells are natural meeting places. The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery highlights that there are certain kinds of well-meetings that happen over and over again in the pages of the Bible:

The Bible presents wells as accommodating three sorts of encounters: human beings with the supernatural; clan with clan (or culture with culture); and man with woman, often in a betrothal scene.

We are going to look at that third one.

The Betrothal-at-a-Well Pattern

The full betrothal-at-a-well scene happens three times in the Old Testament:

• Isaac and Rebekah (Genesis 24)

• Jacob and Rachel (Genesis 29)

• Moses and Zipporah (Exodus 2)

According to Carissa Quinn of BibleProject, a recognizable pattern plays out in each of these scenes.

1. Someone goes on a journey.

2. A man meets a woman at a well.

3. Water is drawn from the well.

4. The woman runs home to bring news of the visitor.

5. The visitor stays in the community and food is shared.

6. The two parties are joined as one.

Why are there three stories that follow such a similar pattern? Is this a coincidence? Does it show us that the Bible has errors and that these are really one story that got reused over and over again as the oral history of Israel morphed over time? In The Art of Biblical Narrative, scholar Robert Alter offers up a different explanation and it is a key to understanding a foundational principle for how the authors of the Bible arranged their work.

Alter writes:

I should like to propose that there is a series of recurrent narrative episodes attached to the careers of biblical heroes that are analogous to Homeric type-scenes in that they are dependent on the manipulation of a fixed constellation of predetermined motifs. Since biblical narrative characteristically catches its protagonists only at the critical and revealing points in their lives, the biblical type-scene occurs not in the rituals of daily existence but at the crucial junctures in the lives of the heroes, from conception and birth to betrothal to deathbed. Not every type-scene will occur for every major hero, though often the absence of a particular type-scene may itself be significant.

In other words, the Bible has patterns. Alter calls these patterns “type-scenes.”

Alter goes on to list a few of the typical type-scenes in the Old Testament.

Some of the most commonly repeated biblical type-scenes I have been able to identify are the following:
1-the annunciation ... of the birth of the hero to his barren mother;
2-the encounter with the future betrothed at a well;
3-the epiphany in the field;
4-the initiatory trial;
5-danger in the desert and the discovery of a well or other source of sustenance;
6-the testament of the dying hero.

Let’s return to Alter’s second common type-scene, the encounter with a future betrothed at a well.

Applying the Well-Meeting Pattern to Isaac and Rebekah’s Story

Step One: Someone goes on a journey

In Genesis 24, Abraham sends his servant to the land of his relatives with explicit instructions not to find Isaac a wife from the Canaanites but from his own distant family instead. The servant takes a long journey to the area where Nahor, Abraham’s relative lives. He arrives at a well around the time that women come out to draw water. He makes his camels kneel beside the well. The stage is set for what comes next.

Step Two: A man meets a woman at a well

As he is waiting for the women to arrive, Abraham’s servant prays an interesting prayer. He asks God that a woman would offer water not only to him but to his camels also and that that woman would be the bride he was searching for. A woman drawing water for a man would be nothing out of the usual at that time, however, the servant is praying that God would send a woman who is so others-centered, that she will go above and beyond what is normal for the sake of a stranger without being asked.

Sure enough, the women arrive as the sun sets and Rebekah, Nahor’s granddaughter, arrives too. The servant asks her if she would draw a “little water” (Gen 24:17) for him to drink but says nothing of watering the camels. Rebekah insists that she will not only give him water but will also water his camels.

Step Three: Water is drawn from the well

Marty Solomon of the BEMA podcast describes how this offer to provide water to all of the camels is a bigger deal than it seems. Abraham’s servant has ten camels. Ten. Camels drink a lot of water at the end of a long journey. The well is most likely a cistern, a pit dug into the ground that connects to an underground spring. To draw water, the women had to walk down stairs into the cistern and haul the water up by hand.

Solomon adds this historical detail:

“The Bedouins and those that live in the middle east say — anywhere from 10 to 20 trips into a cistern, depending on how watered the camel already is, depending on how big your jars are.”

For ten camels it would take 100-200 trips down into the cistern for Rebekah to fulfill her promise. It was typical for cisterns to be about 20 feet deep. Rebekah has signed up for hours of backbreaking labor on behalf of someone she didn’t even know. But this is exactly the kind of person Abraham’s servant was praying for.

(As an aside, this is why when Moses saves his own future wife at a well and waters her flocks for her in Exodus 2, the first thing her father says to her when she arrives home is, “How are you back so soon today?” Drawing water from the well took a long time and Moses sped up the process.)

Step Four: The woman runs home to bring news of the visitor

The next step in the pattern is a hospitality scene. The woman reveals the names of her family members and the servant knows he has accomplished the mission Abraham sent him on. He heaps gold on her and asks to stay in the home of her family that night. Her brother Laban sees the gold and guesses what has happened. He runs out to the well and brings the servant to their home.

Step Five: The visitor stays in the community and food is shared.

The servant’s camels are fed and food is laid before him. He recounts the whole story of his mission for the family and then they eat together.

Step Six: The two parties are joined as one

The family believes that God is behind the day’s events and the servant’s mission and Rebekah joins the servant to journey back with him and become Isaac’s wife. When they arrive home, Isaac and Rebekah are married.

Jesus and the Woman at the Well

Well-meetings are not limited to the Old Testament. Jesus himself meets a woman at the well and it follows all the steps of the well-meeting pattern but bends and expands them.

Jesus’ meeting with the Samaritan woman fits all three categories for meeting-at-a-well scenes. It is an encounter between a human being and the divine, it is a meeting between two cultures, and, believe it or not, it is a betrothal scene.

But that is where we are going next.