Progressive reflections on the lectionary #104
John 4:5-42 - Reading the story of the Woman at the well without a misogynistic lens
The story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman is a classic multi layered text that really showcases the various facets of John’s writing style. It’s funny, cheeky, and of course profound. Not only does ‘John’ employ wit and double entendre, he also offers up the woman of Sychar as a (preferable) literary antagonist to the pharisee Nicodemus, highlighting the radical nature of Johanine theology. I will unpack some of the humour employed, but also say that this is a story of liberation on a number of levels, that deserves careful treatment. Ultimately it reveals Jesus as a liberator who empowers a marginalised figure to herald, or represent, a boundary breaking, inclusive, community.
One of the things that goes overlooked, in the Bible, is the way different writers employ humour. The writer of John was certainly not scared of including laugh out loud passages, even if they haven’t necessarily travelled all that clearly through time. Perhaps some of them were ‘you had to be there’ type situations - but even now, the confusion of Nicodemus the Pharisee over being born again, or the the man born blind trolling the Pharisees in John 9 come across well.
Like the best writers, John uses humour to expose power and elevate marginal characters, the various episodes of ‘confusion’ in his gospel are really literary devices to open up greater explanations. The writer is clever and subversive in his wit.
In this story he repurposes a classic Biblical story motif - the betrothal scene. In the stories of Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, and Moses and Zipporah we get the same sort of scene played out - a man travels to a foreign place, meets a woman at a well, the conversation that follows leads to hospitality and ultimately marriage follows. John’s readers were well versed in this pattern - they could see what the story was setting up.
But of course John subverts the archetype, he stops short of water being drawn. The union here is one of peoples, not of individuals, but still… funny no? Especially when John chucks in some charged language which is pretty obviously sexual. To drink from a cistern or well is used as a euphemism in Proverbs 5 as a warning against promiscuity where the reader is urged to remain faithful to his wife. The ‘springs’, ‘well’ and/or ‘fountains’ in question all reasonably easy to decipher euphemisms.
Drink water from your own cistern,
flowing water from your own well.
Should your springs be scattered abroad,
streams of water in the streets?
Let them be for yourself alone
and not for sharing with strangers.
Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
May her breasts satisfy you at all times;
may you be intoxicated always by her love.
Why should you be intoxicated, my son, by another woman
and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?
Proverbs 5: 15-20
The phrase ‘living water’ also has sexual connotations, both Jeremiah and The Song of Songs (aka Canticles, aka The Song of Solomon) use it, referring, basically to female fecundity. It’s charged language.
The whole scene taken together reads like a kind of ‘nudge-nudge, wink-wink’ set up, drawing the readers in, only to dash their expectations as John refuses the logical, romantic, outcome of his set up. Instead, in a classic case of misdirection, the punchline of the story is a revelation of Jesus’ identity as the awaited Messiah; the empowerment of a marginalised woman; and a dramatic opportunity for the reconciliation of divided peoples.
This clever piece of writing is also building on a set up from the previous chapter where a named character visits Jesus in the dark, here John offers a opposite/mirror story of an unnamed character who comes to Jesus in the daylight. While the first character doesn’t ‘get it’ - here the woman ‘gets it’ straight away, she immediately goes into action as a theologian, evangelist, or community organiser - depending on your perspective. It would be reasonable to say she’s all of the above, of course.
She represents the beginning of an upside down approach to community - an approach that defies the usual boundaries, that includes the excluded, and makes them the leaders.
The vulnerability of the woman herself is at the heart of the story. Too often she is mischaracterised in contemporary exegesis, as someone who is simply ‘immoral’. Her multiple marriages are given as a sign of her promiscuity, which is wrong on a number of levels, and indicative of a misogynist approach to the text.
In the ancient near east women did not initiate divorce. That was forced upon them by either a disgruntled husband, or a dead husband. Why would a husband be dissatisfied? Most likely because she was infertile. It was a legitimate for a man to divorce his wife if she couldn’t produce an heir - marriage, after all, was a primarily (entirely) economic arrangement. So called ‘love marriages’, where romantic attraction is the primary basis for choosing a spouse, are largely a modern Western invention - common only since the industrial revolution.
(Psychologists use the term WEIRD as a shorthand for populations that are Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, & Democratic. We need to remember not to use normative approaches to these texts, because our approaches are deeply WEIRD.)
The likely scenario here is that the woman had either been dumped by men dissatisfied with her ability, or inability, to produce children (flashback to previous gags about fecundity) - or perhaps she had been widowed, and married to brothers to fulfil legal obligations. In any case, her marital difficulties are not to be taken as a sign of personal immorality, but instead seen as an indicator of her personal vulnerabilities. She is at the mercy of a patriarchal system, the telling phrase: ‘the one you have now is not your husband,’ indicates she’s under the protection of a male relative, or that marriage is no longer available to her for some reason. In any case, she’s economically dependent on the men of her world.
It’s a fascinating, and multi layered story this one. Deeply literary, cleverly constructed, and thoroughly indicative of a theology of Jesus as the life‑giving, empowering presence, who empowers a marginalised woman to become the first herald of a boundary‑breaking, inclusive community.
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Progressive Reflections On the Lectionary are intended to be useful to people who preach, or are interested in why on earth anyone still reads the Bible.