March 26, 2021 John 4: 5-6
4:1 Now when
Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, ‘Jesus is making and baptizing
more disciples than John’— 2 although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who
baptized— 3he left Judea and started back to Galilee. 4But he had to go through Samaria. 5So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar,
near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by
his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus
said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that
you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things
in common with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it
is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he
would have given you living water.’ 11The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well
is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the
well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’ 13Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be
thirsty again,
So I
did a little research to begin this post.
Jesus is at the Samaritan city of Sychar, near land given to Joseph by
his father Jacob. Unless I am missing
something (and I will be the first to admit that the amount of stuff I have
missed is HUGE), there is not a clear connection back to the Old Testament for
this. Genesis 33: 18-20 records for us
that Jacob, on his return from gaining a wife in ‘the old country’, confronted
his brother Esau, then moved on to Shechem (which is presumed in the
interpretation to be what was there before Sychar), where he bought a ‘plot of
land’. If there is a record of Jacob
giving it to Joseph, or his digging a well there, both of which are eminently
possible, I have not found it laid out in the Old Testament.
Why is
that important? I am not sure it is, but
it caught my attention. If you begin to
explore it, you will find a whole history around “Jacob’s Well”.
What
is Samaria? It is a portion of what had
been the Northern Kingdom in the history of the Hebrew Bible. Basically, the twelve tribes settled after
the Exodus, lived in the land from Joshua’s leadership through that of the
Judges, till they desired a king. Saul, David,
and Solomon ruled over a single kingdom of the twelve tribes, but then it split
north and south between Rehoboam and Jeroboam, “ten tribes” in the north, “two
tribes” in the south. Jerusalem remained
the capital of the Southern Kingdom. It would be rejected as the 'spiritual' center of Judaism by the Northern Kingdom, which begins the division. Eventually, Assyria would invade, take over, and carry off the
inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom and it would disappear as an independent
political entity from the maps.
While
the Southern Kingdom would be carried off for seventy years into the Babylonian
exile, it would eventually be restored.
Jerusalem would continue as the capital of the Jewish “lands” (they were
not politically independent for more than a few rebellious years after the
Exile).
My
best understanding is that there were still Jews of the lineage of the Northern
Kingdom living in that territory. But
when the Kingdoms divided, they no longer looked to Jerusalem as their “cultural
center” because it was in a competing nation.
So what the people of Samaria did was turn to an even earlier religious
center for their worship of God, Mt. Ebal and Mt. Gerizim. In the book of Joshua, chapters 8-10, the
establishment of the people of God in the Promised Land is recorded and
sanctified at a ceremonial reading of God’s Law by Joshua while the people were
divided on these two mountains.
This
is a lot of backstory, but it is the origin of the divisions of Judea and
Samaria that is the background of our verses today. These were two cultural/religious groups that
were of the same background and of very similar belief and practice, but different
centers of worship; so very divided, causing hatred between them. A parallel from American history can be
argued from the Civil War, where North and South fought one another. One people, divided over the issue of
slavery. And more American dead than in any other conflict in our history/
Jacob’s
Well, as we know it today, is near the modern city of Nablus, which is located
at the spot of these two mountains. Thus
Jesus, on the land that Jacob traditionally gave to his son Joseph, at the well
that the Samaritans believed Jacob himself dug, he is at the very center of Samaritan
worship, at their faith center, as Jerusalem was the faith center to the Jews
of Judea. If the Jewish leadership in
Jerusalem knew he was in Samaria and actively teaching, at best they would
ridicule him. At worst, it would have
gone into the charges they would finally try to bring against him that would
lead to his death.
So it
is about noon, middle of the day, Jesus is tired from the journey up into the
hill country from the Jordan Valley, and he has paused to rest. Against the back drop of the history and
animosity between Judea and Samaria, this story will then unfold.
Note: One of historic curiosity. For Passover, there is a Samarian community of
Jews that sacrifice a lamb on Mt. Gerizim each year.
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