The Gospel According to John Chapter 5 "Jacob's Well" RISV

The RISV Version, with updates as new information is learned

Chapter 5 "Jesus Goes to Jacob's Well"

1 Now, it was necessary for him to pass through Samaria. So he goes to a town, called Sychar, in Samaria, near the property that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.

2 Now, Jacob's well was there, so Jesus, fatigued from travel, was sitting against the well. It was about the 6th hour.

 

3 A woman comes from Samaria to draw water. Jesus says to her, "Feed me drink." For his disciples had gone out into the town to buy food.

 

4 So the Samaritan woman says to him, "How, being a Judean, do you ask me to feed you drink, being a Samaritan woman?" For Judeans have no association with Samaritans.

 

5 Jesus answered and said to her, "If you remembered the gift of God and who is saying to you, 'Feed me drink' you might request of him, and he might have given you living water."

 

6 The woman tells him, "Lord, you don't even have a bucket to draw with and the well is deep. Where then will you get the living water? You are not greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and he, his sons, and his livestock drank from it."

 

7 Jesus answered and said to her, "Everyone drinking from this water will thirst again. But whoever may be fed of the water that I will give them, will never thirst again. Instead, the water given to them will be a spring of water in them, overflowing into eternal life."

 

8 The woman says to him, "Lord, give me this water, that I may not thirst nor come here to draw."

 

9 He tells her, "Go, call your husband and return."

 

10 The woman answered and said to him, "I do not have a husband."

 

11 Jesus tells her, "You spoke well in saying 'I do not have a husband.' For you have had five men, and the one you now have is not your husband. This you have spoken truly."

 

12 The woman says to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you say that the place where it is necessary to worship is in Jerusalem."

 

13 Jesus tells her, "Woman, believe me, that an hour is coming when all will worship the Father, not on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship without knowing. We worship knowing, because salvation descends from the Jews. But a coming hour is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth. And indeed, the Father seeks such who worship him. God is spirit, and who worships him must worship in spirit and truth."

 

14 The woman tells him, "I know the Messiah is coming [the one called Christ]. When he comes, he will disclose everything to us."

 

15 Jesus says to her, "I am—the one speaking to you."

 

16 And at that moment his disciples came, and they marveled that he was speaking with a woman, yet no one said, "What do you seek?" or, "Why are you speaking with her?"

 

17 So the woman abandoned her water jar, went away into the city, and said to the people, "Here! See a man who told me everything I did. Is this not the Christ?" They went forth from the city and came to him.

 

18 In the meantime, his disciples were begging him, saying, "Rabbi, eat."

 

19 But he told them, "I have food to eat which you do not know."

 

20 Therefore the disciples were saying to one another, "Did anyone bring him something to eat?"

 

21 Jesus says to them, "My food is that I must do the will of the One who sent me, and that I should fulfill His work. Do you not say, 'Yet four months and the harvest comes'? Behold! I tell you, lift up your eyes and see the fields, because they are already white for harvest. The reaper receives a reward and gathers fruit into eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper might rejoice together. For this the saying is indeed true, 'One is sowing and another reaping'. I sent you to reap for what you have not labored. Others have labored, and you have entered into their work."

 

22 Now many of the Samaritans out of that city believed in him because of the word of the woman testifying, 'He told me everything I ever did.' so when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days.

 

23 And many more believed because of his word, and they said to the woman, "We believe, no longer because of your speech; for we have heard him ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world."

My Thoughts

The phrase 1"Give me to drink" seems to be something for that there are no proper English words. The concept is something like 1"Feed me drink" and this comes out more in the response by the woman that asks how Jesus can ask her to feed him drink in the form of 2"from me to drink do ask" (1 Δός μοι πεῖν)(2 παρ’ ἐμοῦ πεῖν αἰτεῖς) and it sounds better to use the word "Feed" when lacking a better term to communicate the act of pouring a drink directly into someone's mouth, as it seems this is what Jesus is asking. It's much more absurd to think that this, by the woman's perspective, Judean is asking for her to bring the drink directly to him and feed it to him than it would be to hand him a cup or ladle and thus her response is understood, "How can you ask me to feed you? You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan."

What is this 'Gift of God' that Jesus includes in his answer to the woman? He uses this word "had known" or "remember" seemingly to draw her attention to the water in the well itself as the gift. While I might see some similarities to the well in Beer, where the Lord had instructed Moses to gather the people so he could give them water, and then they traveled to Mattanah, named from the word "Gift", these locations are over 70 km away from Jacob's well. There could still be a connection between God giving them water and Jesus asking for water as both had thirst that was satisfied by the gift. The closest connection I can find is in Targumic Traditions where these texts supposedly talk about the "Well of Israel" being a miraculous gift from God that traveled with the Israelites, and a Midrash quote on Numbers 21, about the well being one that followed the people underground in the wilderness to give them water. It is said this this is the same well "spring of water" that was a gift well originally dug by the fathers, those being Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The woman would then have remembered that the well she was drawing water from is a gift to give to all his people so they may have life, something that she admits to in her response to Jesus.

I don't know what to do with "never not will thirst to the age" (οὐ μὴ διψήσει εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα) in verse 7. This is only my second time seeing such a phrase describing a double negative with an age as the noun. As far as I can tell, it's simply "Will never thirst again" using a metaphorical meaning of 'to the age' to give a time that never comes. Something similar might occur in the last chapter of John's Gospel.

As Jesus continues to talk to the woman, he asks her to fetch her husband and bring him back. She tells him that she doesn't have a husband and Jesus acknowledges that she has cleverly avoided the truth but he already knows the truth. She has been with 5 men, either by means of dependence or for sexual reasons "we do not know" but the man she is with now is not her husband. The double meaning of the word ἄνδρα makes this hard to parse. She may never have been married.

There are some idioms used in their conversation. Nothing that we couldn't understand today. The use of the word "See" to indicating understanding, even though the word is also about vision, and the use of the word "Hour" to indicate a period of time that will have a starting point but no clear ending.

Jesus tells the woman that her people worship without knowing God's plan of redemption because they only kept to the Pentateuch. On the other hand, the people of Judah kept the prophetic scriptures and the temple system, thus they knew that the savior would come from the Jewish people.

The woman tells Jesus that she knows that the Messiah will come to explain everything to them and Jesus responds with saying that he is that person doing that very thing right there. She leaves her jar behind, no longer feeling the need for it, to tell the people in her town that she has found the Christ. He tells them to follow her to the man who disclosed to her the truth.

Jesus tells his disciples that he "I" has food to eat and that they don't know the food. When they question this to themselves, he explains that the food is the will of God to harvest the people in an eschatological sense. The tense of the conversation shifts here too. Making it more impactful that what Jesus is telling them is important. This is his command, to harvest the field, actively.