4 Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
Verse 4 states that "he had to go through Samaria". The words "he had to go" indicate something crucial is going on here, but the text doesn't point it out. This is where geography and history put things into a bigger picture. If you bare with me, this will all make a lot of sense in the next post and why it is important info.
The land of ancient Palestine was separated into three areas: Judah in the south, Galilee in the north, and Samaria smack dab in the middle. Galilee and Judah were Jewish lands. Samaria was an area of confused spiritualists mixing Judaism with whatever they decided to worship. Mostly it was nature, but not the God how made it. They probably were in the running for the patron saint of pluralism. Normally, a Jew traveling from North to South or vice-versa would go around Samaria along the far side of Jordan. It didn't matter that it took an extra day. They viewed Samaritans as spiritual mongrels, in-breeds, and heathens. Needless to say, Jews and Samaritans despised each other with great passion.
To give a small inkling of their overall hatred towards each other, if a Samaritan owed a Jew money, the Samarian would drop the coin money owed into a vessel of water so that when the Jew pulled it out of the water it was considered clean. It would be like whites and blacks in the 1950's in the United States. We had black restrooms and white restrooms. Segregation was something we sadly did as Americans, but it was nothing new. The Jews treated the Samaritans the same way. The Jews would do anything not to be seen as unclean, so they treated them as the whites treated blacks. The Jews would use separate everything to avoid contact with anything a Samaritan touched. There was over a 600 years of bad blood between the Jews and Samaritans.
Verse 5 and 6 gives us a backdrop of how long the people have lived in the area. Joseph's bones were brought back and buried at the well. The 24th chapter of Joshua ,when Joshua assembles all the tribes of Israel, he brings Joseph's bones to the well. This is around 1443 b.c. Joshua declared a rock as a witness as he presented the laws and decrees of God to the people there. The people in Samaria were taken captive by the Persians and made exiles in their own land. During that time of exile the Persians persisted with their idolatry and image worship until the Samaritans combined Judaism and idol worship together, creating a hybrid religion that did not put God as the God of creation, but a god from man's hand. The temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed (Ezra 4:1-5) and the Samaritans offered to help rebuild the temple, but the Jews refused. This created even more tension between them.
Verse 6 tells us Jesus had been traveling in the hot middle eastern sun until noon. He was tired, which tells us even though he was the Son of God, he was still man. The heat drained him of his energy just as it would do to us. The well was not a little "Jack and Jill up the hill" kind of well. This well was nine feet wide and roughly 250 feet deep. There was a wall around it about knee to thigh high. This is where Jesus sat. The last thing we find out in these three verses is the time. It's noon, the hottest part of the day. When the Bible gives us a specific time, there is usually a very good reason for it. Why would a woman walk a mile from town to the well in the heat of the day? I will explain more in the next few posts. Just three short verses and there was all this to explain. These are Cliff notes in comparison to the depth we could really go into.
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