John 4:7-9
How is it that you ask drink of me
He opens by needing something. Her reply names the ethnic wall out loud, and John adds a note explaining it to readers who might miss the scandal.
People of the Bible
The Samaritan woman
Came for water at the hour nobody comes, and left her jar behind to go and tell the town.
She has no name in the text and the longest recorded conversation in the gospels is hers. Everything about the meeting is wrong by the rules of the day: a Jew speaking to a Samaritan, a man speaking to a woman alone, a rabbi asking a favour of both. She notices all three and says so. The hour is the sixth, about noon, which is the wrong time to draw water and suggests a woman arranging her errands around other people.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of The Samaritan woman
- 01
- 02
John 4:10-15
A well of water springing up
She hears living water as plumbing and asks for it so she will not have to come back to the well. The request is practical and it is not corrected.
- 03
John 4:16-19
You have had five husbands
She says she has no husband, which is true, and is told the whole of it. Her response is not shame but a change of subject to theology.
- 04
John 4:20-26
I that speak unto you am he
She raises the mountain dispute and is answered with worship in spirit and in truth. Then she says she knows Messiah is coming, and gets the plainest self-disclosure in John.
- 05
John 4:28-30
She left her waterpot
The detail is small and does all the work. She abandons the errand, goes to the people she had been avoiding, and brings them out to see for themselves.
Why it matters
The conversation moves in stages and she drives most of them. She argues about wells, about ancestors, about which mountain is the right one, and every deflection is answered rather than dismissed. When he names her five husbands she does not deny it. What she does next is the point: she leaves the waterpot, the one thing she came for, goes into the city and says come see a man which told me all things that ever I did, and many of the Samaritans believed on him for the saying of the woman.
4 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
