A Dozen Thoughts on the Samaritan Woman at the Well
Reflections on the Lectionary for March 12th
The lectionary for March 12th contains one of my very favorite stories in the whole New Testament: the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. The passage, which appears in John 4 with no parallels in any other gospel, is such a fantastic test case for biblical interpretation that I have sometimes given talks to groups on exegesis or interpretation that uses this passage as the example for a dozen or so different methods. That talk goes for an hour or more, so I can’t type all of it out here, but I’ll put a few observations in this post to get us thinking about the potentials of this passage.
Take a moment to follow that link above, or flip your bible open to John 1:5-42, and read the passage. Maybe read it twice. Pay attention to what you notice. Then keep reading here.
1) This passage rests on logics of mutual exclusion—that men and women, Jews and Samaritans, and people with religious differences cannot be in relationship. That logic is familiar to our time and place too, with different particularities. It’s worth asking whether and how this passage reinforces or erodes those logics. Where does that kind of logic show up in our world, and how does this passage invite us to question it or knock it down?
2) The translation of this passage into English usually obscures the fact that the “yous” in the early part of the passage are singular (4:9, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19), while the “yous” in the latter part are plural (4:20, 21, 22). Because English doesn’t do second person plurals very well, it’s hard to tell, but in the middle of their conversation, Jesus and the Samaritan woman switch from talking to and about each other (“you”) to talking to and about larger groups (“y’all”). It’s a really important shift, as it moves the conversation from the interpersonal to the inter-ethnic, and it’s nearly invisible in English.
3) The parenthetical remark in 4:9 that “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans” doesn’t appear in all the ancient manuscripts of this text, and therefore might have been a marginal note or scribal addition that was afterward copied into the text.
4) 4:26, “I am he” in English, is the thing Jesus commonly says in the Gospel of John, “ego eimi” in the Greek. Jesus says this as a way of mirroring God’s self-description at the burning bush in Exodus, “I am.” He does this a lot in John, as a way of signaling his divine status, and it’s usually translated as “I am” with more to follow: “I am the true vine,” “I am the good shepherd,” and so forth.
5) As I mentioned last week, to understand this story you really also have to understand John 3, which contains the story of Nicodemus. The two are meant to be understood together, and Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman are in many ways mirror images of each other.
6) The trope of men and women meeting at wells is well-worn in the biblical tradition. Moses meets his wife Zipporah at a well, Jacob meets Rachel at a well, and Isaac sends his servant to a well to find him a wife, who ends up being Rebekah. For readers who were literate in the traditions of the Hebrew Bible, this setting might create the expectation that—like those three couples—Jesus’ meeting with the woman at the well might produce a marriage. They do not get married, of course, but they do talk about marriage. It’s a twist on an old stock scene.
7) One of the theories about the community behind the gospel of John (the “beloved community,” the “community of the beloved disciple,” or the “Johannine community”) is that in the middle and end of the first century this group or community ended up migrating northward through Samaria and incorporating Samaritans and other Others into their number. If that’s true, then this story might have been a way for that community to explain to themselves why that was ok. After all, if Jesus reached across lines of difference, they could too. This story might have served a legitimizing function in their communal life.
8) Many of my first encounters with this story were centered on criticisms of the Samaritan woman’s sexuality. She was (and often still is) described as morally degenerate and sexually promiscuous. I think that’s really implausible, given the realities of marriage in the first century and the controls and limits placed on women’s bodies and agency. If we are to take this description of her as someone who had had five husbands as historical, then we can’t also pretend that all five of those marriages were her idea. She likely would not have possessed that kind of agency. Instead, some scholars have imagined that she was trapped in a cycle of levirate marriages, or that she was otherwise subjected to marriages that she did not choose. In no case does it make sense to talk about her as someone who chose her many relationships, as many or most exegetes do.
9) Relatedly, readings of this passage sometimes center the male gaze—what the woman (and her sexuality) look like from the perspective of reproductivity and male desire. What happens if we take that away, removing the prurient interest so many interpreters seem to have in her, and ask about her as a human being, apart from her gender, body, or sexuality?
10) Usually we see “the one you have now is not your husband” in 4:18 as a moment when Jesus catches the woman in dishonesty, and outs her for living in a relationship out of wedlock. But why do we assume that “the one” is a man? The pronoun in question here in Greek is masculine, but in English (at least in the NRSV), the possibility is open that “the one you have now” is not a man at all. What happens to our interpretations of this passage if we allow ourselves to imagine that? What happens to the male gaze?
11) Jesus and the Samaritan woman are both colonized subjects. We cannot ignore, in this passage or in most others in the bible, that the stories take place under the pressure of imperial power and violence and often under direct colonial occupation. The histories of both Samaria and Jesus’ own Judea and Galilee were marked by external domination and occupation. It’s perhaps not accidental that within those circumstances, when Jesus and the Samaritan woman meet to talk about their differences, they do so in Sychar, where Jacob’s well was. Jacob was a common ancestor and potentially a symbol of a pre-domination, pre-occupation history. Their discussions about which mountain they should worship on (Gerizim in Samaria or Zion in Jerusalem) are about territory, something that’s always fraught in systems of coloniality and empire, and in the first century neither of those territories were free from domination and violence. Both of their lives were limited and shaped by that kind of external control and effect.
12) Taking the maxim of liberation theology, that God is on the side of the oppressed, whose side is God on in this story? I am not sure it is Jesus’ side that represents the side of the oppressed. Can we imagine a story in which Jesus enters into conversation with a person who has God on their side? Can we expand our notions of who Jesus was wide enough to imagine Jesus encountering God’s presence in the Other?