Women at the Well
“The Woman at the Well” (John 4: 1-30, 39-42) is a well known and influential New Testament text. On his way to Galilee, Jesus stops at a well near the town of Sychar in Samaria, while his disciples go into town to get some food. A Samaritan woman is drawing water there and he asks her for a drink. As a result of the ensuing conversation, Jesus becomes the Messiah of the Samaritan people, and the woman becomes his messenger to those same people.
But this is not the way many Christians understand John 4. Rather, for many of us this is the story of an adulteress or of a woman who serves as Jesus’ “straight man,” that is, who offers him a series of cues so that he can demonstrate that he knows everything.*
This interpretive tradition takes three primary forms. The first emphasizes vv. 16 to 18 in which Jesus tells the woman to go call her husband. The woman replies that she has no husband, and Jesus tells her that what she has said is true, that she has had five husbands, and that the man she has now is not her husband. This exchange shows the woman to be a sexually immoral woman.
But nothing in the text suggests this. Jesus does not condemn this woman. Rather, he praises her for her candor. And we know from Mark 12:18-27 that levirate marriage—a woman marrying even an entire series of brothers-in-law to preserve the patriarchal line—was practiced in the time of Jesus. We also know that women without men to support them were impoverished, because Jesus refers to the poverty of a widow later in Mark 12. There were, in fact, few wage-bearing jobs for women in first century Israel, so women whose husbands died or abused them made arrangements with other men in order to survive.
This interpretive tradition also teaches that the woman went to the well in the middle of the day because she was ashamed to encounter other women because of her adultery. But this reading makes no sense at all; why would she not have met other women in the middle of the day? The woman was at the well because she had to haul a great deal of water—not just for drinking and cooking but also for washing, for livestock, and for crafts work.
A second interpretation of John 4 makes the woman a symbol of the pagan idolatry of the Samaritan people. This reading refers back to passages in Hosea and Jeremiah in which infidelity to God is portrayed as adultery. But it does not say in John 4 that the Samaritans are unfaithful, only that they “do not know God” (v. 22). How then can the woman be a symbol of their nonexistent adultery?
A third approach makes the woman not an adulterer but fundamentally irrelevant to the story. Here, the purpose of the story is to manifest Jesus’ omniscience—he knows the woman was married five times, but he doesn’t care why this is the case, and neither, it is implied, should we. Now I don’t know about you, but this portrait of a Jesus who uses a woman to set up the demonstration of his brilliance and wisdom conflicts seriously with my understanding of him as someone who cares deeply about people and treats them with respect. And if we read the text carefully we see that the Samaritan woman is far from Jesus’ “straight man”; rather, she asks Jesus real questions that enable him to better understand his mission and communicate about himself.
These negative portrayals of the Samaritan woman are harmful because they make women look immoral and insignificant. But they are also harmful because they distract us from the real meaning of the story. The woman in John 4 is an active subject, an agent, who collaborates with Jesus in his messianic ministry. Jesus asks her for water and she asks him for water as well. As a result, both of them are changed, Jesus’ mission is advanced, and the Samaritan woman no longer needs to live with a man who doesn’t respect her enough to marry her.
The other thing we need to bear in mind about this woman is that her exchange with Jesus liberates her from hauling water. Experts tell us that women in the time of Jesus hauled so much water that it damaged their posture. There’s a tendency to give an exclusively spiritual interpretation to the passage about Jesus as living water, but the woman’s words contradict this. She says, “Sir give me this water so that I may never be thirsty again or have to keep coming here to draw water” (v. 15). And then later, after she realizes that Jesus is the Messiah and goes to tell her people, we read that she “left her water jar behind” (v. 28). Her encounter with Jesus liberates her not only from an exploitative relationship but also from the oppression of hauling water.
This interpretation is important because today, millions of women all over the world are forced, like the Samaritan woman, to haul water long distances for their very survival. Consider these statistics:
- 1.1 billion people –40% of the world’s population—lack access to safe drinking water. Women and girls, in particular, spend 40 billion hours a year hauling water from distant, frequently polluted sources.
- 2.4 billion people lack access to sanitation; 5 million of them die annually from water-borne diseases, including one child every 15 seconds.
This situation is caused by more than bad luck. As the world’s population explodes, nations in the global South have learned from the West to use wasteful and unsustainable irrigation methods that deplete freshwater resources. Production of the commodities for which we in the West have an insatiable appetite—especially cars, electronics and oil—gobbles up water at an unsupportable rate. And transnational corporations like Bechtel, Suez, OMI/Thames and Veolia are buying up the public water systems of nations in the global South. They then triple or quadruple the price of water and cut off water to those who can’t afford to pay, thus forcing women and girls to walk miles to distant polluted sources. A primary reason for this growing privatization of water is that international financial institutions like the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank make the sale of water systems to global corporations by countries in the global South a condition of receiving much needed development loans.
In a more hopeful vein, there has been some slowing of attempts to privatize water systems in the US. Cash-starved local governments have for some years been selling municipal water systems with the expectation that because of their financial resources global corporations will maintain and rebuild rapidly deteriorating water system infrastructures. Research shows, however, that in most cases, the corporations maintain water services only for those most able to pay. In 2004, the city of Stockton, California, y contracted their city water system to OMI/Thames, but a number of local citizens groups organized to resist the move, and in 2007 won a legal case that returned the water to public control. There has also in recent years been increasing awareness of the health hazards and ethical implications of drinking bottled water, another hopeful development.
The realization that John 4 portrays the intimate connection between Jesus’ messiahship and the liberation of a poor woman from the drudgery of hauling water brings with it certain obligations. Christians cannot offer only the spiritual living water of the Gospel to sisters and brothers in developing nations and in our own cities. We must also offer them clean, affordable water, and liberate them from the drudgery of hauling water over long distances. A first step toward accomplishing this is to inform ourselves about the world water crisis and its causes. One excellent resource is the Water for All campaign, sponsored by the consumer justice organization, Public Citizen, at www.citizen.org/cmep/Water. The Water for All listserv sends out regular action alerts about how to protest water privatization in developing countries and in the US. Other resources include books by the Canadian water activist, Maude Barlow, including Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water (New Press 2008) and Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (Earthscan 2003).
Finally, let us join together to ask the One who liberated the woman at the well to give us the energy and commitment to secure a decent life and fresh water for our sisters and brothers around the world.
* Much of this exegesis of John 4 is drawn from Luise Schottroff, “The Samaritan Woman and the Notion of Sexuality in the Fourth Gospel,” 157-181. In Fernando S. Segovia, ed., What is John? Scholars Press, 1998.
