The Samaritan Woman

The writer of John’s gospel had a number of characters who are unnamed. Among these are the Mother of Jesus, the Beloved Disciple, the Paralyzed Man at the Pool, the Man Born Blind, and the Royal Official. These were real people with their own identities and stories, but leaving them nameless heightens the symbolism in their stories.

What the story is about:
The story of the Samaritan woman makes a strong statement about the role of women in the early Christian communities. The woman is not silent, and she is not limited to the private world of women. She has a voice, and she moves out into the public arena, into male space. She enters into debate with Jesus about issues and questions that interest her. She does not wait for permission to do so, but takes the initiative herself.

The story of the woman of Samaria contains three sections:
1 The woman meets Jesus at a well (John 4:1-26)
Jesus, traveling with his disciples and friends, stops at a well. There he meets and is questioned by a Samaritan woman. She becomes convinced that he is the Messiah.

2 The woman returns to her town (John 4:27-38)
The disciples return. The woman goes back to her town, and tells everyone about Jesus. They come back to meet Jesus for themselves. The disciples urge Jesus to eat, but he says he has already had food.

3 The woman convinces many people about Jesus (John 4:39-42)
Many Samaritans believe in Jesus, because of the woman. Jesus stays with the townspeople for two days.

THE WOMAN MEETS JESUS AT A WELL
(John 4:1-26)

During the course of his journeys, Jesus traveled from Judea in the south back to Galilee in the north, going via Samaria. Normally, Jewish travelers made a detour around Samaria to avoid contact with Samaritans, but Jesus took the direct route. He came to Sychar, which was a town near Jacob’s Well.

There had once been a great city there, just where this incident took place. Nearby on the peak of Mount Gerizim had been a temple that rivaled the Temple of Jerusalem.

But all this had been destroyed before the time of Jesus, and only a village remained. Here Jesus stopped, tired and thirsty in the midday heat. His friends had gone to the town to buy food. Only a Samaritan woman was there, drawing water from the well.

‘Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her “Give me a drink”. (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The 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.) Jesus 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”.’
Read John 4:1-10

Every drop of water used in a household had to be carried from the local well. So every day women walked to the bottom of the steps cut into the rock, filled their heavy earthenware jars, returned up the steps, and carried the water home. The strong younger women of the household normally did this task, but this is not happening here. The Samaritan woman is no longer young, and since she is carrying her own water, it seems she did not have younger women in her household to do this heavy task.

Jesus asked the Samaritan woman for something to drink, and here begins the longest conversation recorded between Jesus and any person. It is surprising that this conversation happens with someone who was a woman, and non-Jewish. The woman herself was certainly surprised when Jesus spoke to her, because Jews and Samaritans did not have anything to do with each other.

There had been a long-running conflict between the Jews and the Samaritans. Samaria had been the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel during the period of the divided kingdoms. In 721BC Assyria conquered Israel, and sent most of its people to live in Assyria. The Assyrians replaced the original people with five alien tribes who resettled the area (for information on this event, see 2 Kings 17:13-34).

Eventually many of the original population returned and intermarried with the five alien tribes. By the time of Jesus, Jews thought that the people who lived in Samaria were not true descendants of the Jewish ancestors, and that their religion was not true Judaism but a mixture of beliefs.

Jesus blithely disregarded the ancient enmity between the two groups. He began talking to the woman about ‘living water’. The woman questioned him and drew him into conversation. Jesus explained that when people drink ordinary water, they get thirsty again. But he had water that gave eternal, not temporary, life. Naturally this caught the interest of the woman, burdened as she was with the daily task of carrying water. She asked for some of this 'living water'.

Jesus told her to go and get her husband. She did not have one, she replied. You have had five husbands, said Jesus, but the man you are living with now is not your husband. At this stage the story contains a great deal of symbolism. The woman herself stood for Samaria, and her five husbands stood for the five alien tribes. The man she was now living with, who was not her true husband, stood for the Samaritan religion.

The woman understood Jesus’ meaning immediately. He was speaking about Samaritan worship in the same way that the Jewish prophets before him had done.
Knowing this, the woman called him a prophet, and began asking him about differences between Samaritan and Jewish worship. She knew that the temple on nearby Mount Gerizim had been the central place of worship for the Samaritans, rivaling the Temple in Jerusalem. Samaritans and Jews always argued over which of the two temples was the true place to worship.

Basically the woman was talking with Jesus about where and how you should worship God, an issue that interested her. She spoke to him as an intellectual equal, and he responded.
Jesus told her that very soon none of these arguments would matter, because the Messiah was coming, and he would change everything. In fact, he said, the Messiah had actually arrived, and it was he.

The possible site of Jacob's Well is now enclosed within a Greek Orthodox church

THE WOMAN RETURNS TO HER TOWN
(John 4:27-38)

Jesus’ friends returned, and were nonplussed to find him talking to a woman.
Note that the disciples are surprised that Jesus is talking to a woman. They are not surprised that he is talking to a Samaritan, even though at the time that this event took place in about 30AD, Samaritans were viewed with great suspicion. By the time that John wrote his gospel, the situation had changed, and there was more concern about the inclusion of women in authority positions than about fraternization with Samaritans.

The woman left the water jar she has brought and hurried back to the town.
‘She said to the people “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and went on their way to him.’
(Read John 4:28-30)

Leaving her water jar seems a trivial piece of information, but it parallels other incidents in the gospels, when various men left their everyday pursuits, abandoning fishing nets or tax collection tables to immediately respond to Jesus.

The woman told everyone about Jesus, suggesting that he might be the Messiah.
After Jesus' death and resurrection, the male disciples would go and tell people about Jesus because they were sent to do so. The Samaritan woman did the same thing, but on her own initiative. She saw what should be done and did it.

THE WOMAN CONVINCES MANY PEOPLE ABOUT JESUS
(John 4:39-42)

In the meantime, the friends of Jesus urged him to eat. But Jesus refused, saying that he has eaten food they did not know about. He meant that the food we give our souls and minds is at least as important as the food we give our bodies. We shall never find happiness unless we nourish our souls and minds as well as our bodies. This was similar to the Greek ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body, but Jesus extended the idea to give it a spiritual dimension.

Then Jesus talked about the harvest. He was not referring to a harvest of foodstuffs, but to the many people who would believe in him. Among them were the Samaritan townspeople, who had listened to the words of the woman. Inclusion of the Samaritans among those whom Jesus favored was revolutionary, since there was bitter enmity between the Jewish and Samaritan peoples.

The woman had persuaded them to believe in Jesus. In this, she acted as an apostle, going out to tell people about Jesus, and bringing them to him.
‘Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony “He told me everything I have ever done”. So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days.’
(Read John 4:39-42)

The Samaritans invited him to stay, and he stayed for two days. Many people believed in Jesus, not just because of the woman but because they have seen for themselves that Jesus was the Saviour of the world. ‘Saviour of the world’ was one of the titles of the Roman Emperor, but at the time that John’s gospel was written, it was being used increasingly among Christians to describe Jesus.

Summary
In this story, a woman experienced the progressive stages of faith in Jesus. She met Jesus, she learnt about him, and she came to believe in him. Then she went and told other people about him.

The people listening to her also came to believe in Jesus. It did not matter that she was a woman and a Samaritan. Gender and nationality were not important. No one was excluded from the Christian community.

ATTITUDES TO WOMEN AT THAT TIME

Gospel stories are often discussed as if they happened in isolation, outside the real world. But in fact they occurred within a historical context, against a cultural background quite different to our own. Knowing about the world of the gospel gives the reader a better understanding of the stories.

Greek philosophy was greatly admired at the time of Jesus, and it had a profound impact on the way that people saw their world. One of the greatest philosophers, Plato, proposed the theory of dualism, suggesting that everything in the cosmos had an equal and opposite other. This theory had a profound impact on the way that women were viewed, and it was not to women's advantage. 'Woman' was placed in a category containing elements that were viewed as negative:

   Man   -                 Woman
   Civilization   -      Nature
   Reason/logic   - Emotion
   Good   -               Evil
   Light   -                Darkness

Keep in mind that
    Civilization was the ideal; Nature was mistrusted and potentially dangerous
    Logic and reason were admired, and emotion was to be subordinated.
    Goodness was always preferable to evil.
    Light, especially in the pre-industrial world, was preferred to darkness.

These are examples only, but they show that Platonic dualism placed women in a negative category. They were seen as closer to the natural/animal world than men. By nature they were irrational and untrustworthy, and therefore unfit to make their own decisions and govern their own lives. They had to be looked after and controlled, never treated as equals.

This differed from the traditional Jewish way of looking at the world, which saw all things in creation as integrated and complementary, rather than as opposites of each other. An example of this is the creation story of Eve, which relates that the first woman was created from a rib taken by God from Adam's side, thereby suggesting that a man could never be fully complete unless he was in partnership with a woman.

Jewish and Jewish/Christian women resisted the ideas of Platonic dualism, which patronized them and diminished their status. While Christianity remained a Jewish sect, the status of women within the Christian communities was high.

But as the ideas of Christianity moved out into the Gentile, Hellenised world, the first Christians found they had to use the Greek philosophical framework to explain their beliefs and be accepted. So Jesus' original ideal of mutual respect between the sexes was watered down and changed. Women found they were given roles that were acceptable in the outside, Hellenistic culture. In doing so, the Christian church stepped back from the radical ideals of the first Jewish/Christians.

Women were still powerful in the private sphere, but were shunted to the side in the public arena. This shows up, for example, in 1st and 2nd century re-tellings of the biblical stories. Where these stories had often had women as central characters, they now focused on men and male activities.

An example of this is the story of Moses’ birth in Josephus’ Antiquities (Josephus was a Jewish writer and historian of the 1st century BC).
In the original biblical telling of the story (in Exodus 1 and 2) the baby Moses is saved by the two midwives, by his mother, by his sister, and by Pharaoh’s daughter – all, obviously, women.

In Josephus’ retelling of the story written in about 94AD, the focus is largely on Moses’ father Amram. He performs many of the actions previously attributed to the women. Female characters in the story are changed. The mid-wives in Josephus’ retelling
    are Egyptian, not Hebrew
    are unnamed
    are not present at Moses' birth
    kill Hebrew babies, not save them.
The basic story of Moses’ birth remains the same, but the female dimension has been lost.

There were reasons for the changes Josephus made to the story. He was trying to counter the anti-Semitism that existed in Rome at the time, so he wrote about Jewish women who behaved like decent Roman matrons! This ideal of Roman womanhood had been vigorously promoted in a ‘back to basics’ program by the emperor Augustus and the Roman authorities.

The ideal Roman woman, they said, was a mother of many children, content with her household duties. She kept to her traditional role, in the home, and did not speak assertively to the men in her family. She did not enter the public world.