The Slutty Woman at the Well? John 4, Part 1

What is actually implied about the Samaritan woman at the well?

Photo by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times.

One day, Jesus was traveling through Samaria. His disciples left him to go get food in the city at a well. Then, the most bizarre thing happened. A woman, by herself, came to get water at noon. This was very odd, because women usually go out for this journey in groups, and in the morning and evening, when it’s cool out. The fact that she was out by herself goes to show just how unlikely it is (and how gracious Jesus is) that he would minister to her. This woman was clearly an outcast because otherwise she would not be out alone. Jesus later calls her out for having five husbands and “a man who is not her husband,” which provides even more context for why this woman was an outcast. The woman is a husband-stealing no-goodnik, who no one would want to be around, and even then, Jesus spoke to her.

The way this passage, from John 4, is often depicted in film and television is that Jesus and the Samaritan woman are miles from civilization, all by themselves, and the very fact that she is alone by herself is an indication that people don’t want to be around her. Combine this with the fact that she’s had five husbands, and the data that the Samaritan woman is unpopular because of her sluttiness is seen as incontrovertable.

So was she? Was the Samaritan woman an outcast? For sexual transgressions?

There are two major pieces of evidence for this that are usually employed here: the fact that the woman is out by herself getting water in the middle of the day, and the fact that she’d had five husbands and “the one she has now is not her husband.”

In Part 2 we’ll look at the issues of marriage, divorce, and womanhood. For this now, we’ll start with this: is the woman alone because she’s an outcast?

What Time Is It, Anyway?

There are two other references I was able to find in the Bible to a time of day related to drawing water. The first is in Genesis 29:8, when Rachel is at the well watering her flocks at the middle of the day. The second is 1 Sam 9 during Saul’s extended donkey chase, where he encounters women going out to get water. This is probably later in the day.

Now, here’s the first thing to note. We don’t actually know exactly what time of day Jesus gets to the well. John says it’s the “sixth hour.” From Roman counting, this would be the evening, but by normal Jewish hours, this would be lunch. Neither corresponds obviously to the fact that the disciples were getting food — they could be getting a midday snack, or they could be getting food for the evening meal. Nor does either time clearly correspond with Jesus’s long walk from Judea back to Galilee. According to Google Maps, it’s about a sixteen hour walk from Jerusalem to present-day Shechem.

However, there is a little detail in John that makes me think he might actually be using Roman time. The time for Jesus’s trial in John is John 19:14 is also “the sixth hour.” Matthew, Mark, and Luke all say that when Jesus was crucified, from the sixth to the ninth hour there was darkness over the whole land (Matt 27:45, Mark 15:33, Luke 23:44). But John, who otherwise loves light/dark imagery, says nothing about darkness being over the land when Jesus is crucified. Could it be that John thinks that Jesus was crucified in the evening — in which case, darkness coming over the land would not be surprising? This could also explain why the people in John are so eager to get Jesus off the cross and buried (John 19:31, 19:42). If there are only a few hours of dusk to work with, crucifying Jesus has to be done pretty quickly.

The other issue is that if this happens at high heat in the middle of the day, when (as Keener notes in John 1:592), this raises the question of how the disciples are going to buy food. Breaks and naps are widely attested in Mediterranean climates, so there’s a possibility that this would have been a shopping trip when most stores are closed for lunch. But this might be speculation.

However, the Roman clock creates some other issues in John’s timetable if John is counting hours from noon rather than morning (John 1:39 would be around 10 PM). So perhaps we shouldn’t hang our hats on this too heavily.

So this brings us to the next question: is there an explanation for why a woman might be drawing water at noon, except for being an outcast?

Getting Water in Shechem

Raymond Brown notes that while most translations have the setting of John 4 as Sychar, there is a Syrian reference to the story taking place in Shechem, which Jerome repeats (Brown, ,John, 1:169). There’s no archeological evidence for a town in Sychar, and Askon (the other possible reference of Sychar) is about a mile away from Jacob’s well and was host to primarily medieval settlements. Shechem, on the other hand, is an easy 250 feet from Jacob’s well. So if there’s a historical referent in this text at all, this is probably the more likely option.

Shechem is also right below Mount Gerazim, which becomes the focus of the later part of Jesus’s conversation - do we worship on “this mountain” or not. So what can we know about getting water at Shechem?

Mount Gerazim itself was water-poor. Josephus says that a group of Samaritans on the mountain were easily sieged when they ran out of water on the mountain (JW 3.32). But Shechem, down the mountain, was not. Shechem itself did not have internal municipal water access – the city of Samaria itself eventually got an aqueduct that the Romans constructed from Nablus, but Shechem did not. But on the whole, this wasn’t a problem. Shechem was surrounded by springs and an accessible water table. Holofernes has to go to considerable extent to guard access to all these springs in Judith (7:7, 12-13, 17), where the people of Shechem get their water. (Shechem may be the real name of the town in Judith, which is otherwise unattested). 

So there’s a historical plausibility here that a woman from Shechem has to go outside the city to go get water – that’s where the water is. But the idea that this would have been a major trek is unlikely. The well of Jacob is about two hundred and fifty feet from the town of Shechem, and was one of several accessible springs and wells in the area and a reliable underground water supply. It’s unlikely the town depended on any single well, which makes the idea of a regular morning/evening trip out to get water from which the Samaritan woman is excluded less likely. This wasn’t an extended trek, these were wells and springs that would have been near at hand. There wouldn’t be a need to travel in groups to water, because the water would have been nearby.

So this already calls into question the idea that Jesus is out in the middle of nowhere, with another woman in the middle of nowhere. Why are they so far from the city — as they are often portrayed in media, and recently, The Chosen?

“WHERE ARE YOU GOING, SWEETIE?”

Eickelman’s anthropologist treatment of the Middle East is often cited as evidence that gathering water alone is unusual (Eickelman, The Middle East: An Anthropological Perspective, 163), but Eickelman’s source was pre-running-water Adlun. The fact that women mingled at a public fountain is not in itself evidence that women do not use a public fountain alone.

So why is the time mentioned? It could be to emphasize the fact that Jesus is tired, which is an unusual detail for John (John usually doesn’t like portraying Jesus as weak), as it says in John 4:6. But I think there are two other possibilities here – first, that the Samaritan woman is likened to Rachel, and second, that she is likened to Zipporah.

Meeting at the Well at Noon

We’ve already noted that Rachel comes to get water in the middle of the day in Genesis (29:7-10). In the Genesis passage, Jacob meets Rachel at the well, removes the stone covering the well, and draws water for her. The Genesis parallels in John 4 are obvious — Jesus and the woman are at Jacob’s well, and Jesus (figuratively) draws water for her. The passage could suggest that the Samaritan woman, by going into the city, becomes a kind of matriarch in her own right.

The other possibility is that the woman is like Zipporah. Moses meets Zipporah when he also sits by a well after a long journey, in Exod 2:15. Josephus has it that this meeting also happened at noon (Josephus, Ant., 2.257).

The passage could also be making a deliberate contrast between Nicodemus, who comes to Jesus at night and does not understand him (John 3), whereas the Samaritan woman meets Jesus in the daytime and does.

But as it stands, the evidence that this woman is 1) out during the day and 2) doing something that is extremely unusual, is simply not as compelling as we have assumed.

That still leaves us with the five husbands problem, which we’ll get to in Part 2.