Yeshua Meets the Women at the Well ~ Part 1

We pick up our story of Yeshua’s ministry in Shomron as He Meets the Women at the Well. As this a familiar story to most. It covers some thirty-two verses, so I decided to go short to provide the background and Yeshua’s response.

⁵ He came to a town in Shomron called Sh’khem, near the field Ya’akov had given to his son Yosef. ⁶ Ya’akov’s Well was there; so Yeshua, exhausted from His travel, sat down by the well; it was about noon.

Tel-Sh’khem (the archeological site of Sh’khem) is just outside modern Nablus in Shomron, and Ya‛akov’s Well, not far away, is a tourist site to this day.

As a human being, He experienced human exhaustion; as Son of God, He worked continuously (5:17); compare Hebrews 4:15.

⁷ A woman from Shomron came to draw some water, and Yeshua said to her, “Give me a drink of water.”

The standard time to draw water was morning or evening during the cooler hours of the day. This woman is coming to draw water at a time when no one else would usually be at the well.

⁸ (His talmidim had gone into town to buy food.) ⁹ The woman from Shomron said to Him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for water from me, a woman of Shomron?” (For Jews don’t associate with people from Shomron.) ¹⁰ Yeshua answered her, “If you knew God’s gift, that is, who it is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink of water,’ then you would have asked him; and he would have given you living water.”

Yeshua had a way of masterfully reaching the people with whom He shared. To the woman at the well, He spoke of living water. To aging Nicodemus, He talked about being born again. To the blind man, He identified Himself as the Light of the world (Yochanan 9:5). To sisters grieving the death of their brother, He was the Resurrection and the Life (Yochanan 11:25). To fishermen, He invited them to become fishers of men (Mattityahu 4:19). ^[1]

¹¹ She said to him, “Sir, you don’t have a bucket, and the well is deep; so where do you get this ‘living water’? ¹² You aren’t greater than our father Ya’akov, are you? He gave us this well and drank from it, and so did his sons and his cattle.”

You don’t have a bucket. The woman misunderstands Yeshua as speaking of literal water; this is reasonable based on the use of living water as an idiom for spring water. The woman’s identification of Ya’akov as her ancestor shows the Samaritans believed themselves to be the rightful descendants of Ya’akov and true Israeli.

¹³ Yeshua answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will get thirsty again, ¹⁴ but whoever drinks the water I will give him will never be thirsty again! On the contrary, the water I give him will become a spring of water inside him, welling up into eternal life!”  ~ Yochanan 4:5-14

In Hebrew, Mayim chayyim (literally, living water) means running water from a stream or spring, contrasting with water stored in a cistern. Figuratively, with Yeshua, it means spiritual life; see Yochanan 7:37–39.

Our next post will continue to examine that YeshuaMeets the Women at the Well ~ Part 2.

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^[1] Courson, J. (2003). Jon Courson’s Application Commentary (p. 466).