Salvation & Samaria, 2 Topics

In our last section, we got off on a couple of tangents, one regarding the terms sōtēr/sōtēria and the second on Samaria. 

When I looked up the two terms in Strong’s Words, I was shocked (Shocked!) to see that some form of the word basically did not appear at all in the Synoptic Gospels. That one took me aback and prompted this special post. However, before going any further, I need to confess that I was a bit hasty: while the noun forms, “saviour” and “salvation” do not appear in the Synoptics, the underlying verb, sōzō, “to save” occurs often enough that it’s not sufficiently unusual to raise an eyebrow. Of course there is a “but”; but the way the word is used refers to saving, or preserving, the physical body in the vast majority of cases. For example, of the eleven occurrences in Mark, only two can easily be read as referring to something other, presumably a soul. And there is a third that is ambiguous. There are fourteen uses in Matthew; three can be read as the soul, and two others are also ambiguous. The numbers are the same in Luke. Of these corporeal references, a number of them are best translated as “heal” rather than “save”. The best example is the Bleeding Woman of Matthew 9:22 and Luke 8:48. Note that Mark does not use the verb sōzō in his version of this pericope; he chooses iatros, which in Greek has clearly medical connotations. But Luke follows Matthew and uses  both sōzō and iatros. This puts the Q-defenders with a bit of a sticky wicket, no?

The word is also frequently used in Acts and the later epistles, whether of Deutero-Paul or any of the others. In the authentic epistles of Paul, however, the theme appears multiple times in each letter. So what happened? The idea was in Paul, then it vanished (more or less), and re-appeared in Luke and in later writings.

Here is my suggestion. One of the questions asked by the disciples is, to paraphrase, “who then can be saved, if not the rich?”. This is one of the cases where I count the verb as at least ambiguous, if it’s not overtly a reference to a non-corporeal soul. But let’s think about that for a minute. Specifically, let’s try to clear away the accumulated strata of interpretation that have accrued over two millennia. Remember that Paul was a Pharisee. Remember that Josephus says the Pharisees believed in the Resurrection of the Body but other groups did not. Now add in that Paul was the biggest proponent of the idea of salvation. Then remember the description of the believers being raised into the air while Christ descends on a cloud as told in 1 Thessalonians 4. This latter sure sounds like the believers will enter the Kingdom as physical entities. This is entirely consistent with a Resurrection of the Body. So what if in Mark 10:26, Matthew 19:25, and Luke 18:26, when the disciples ask “who can be saved?” they are not referring to immortal souls, but to physical bodies? How are you going to be resurrected if your physical body no longer exists? 

Understanding salvation in this way is wholly consistent with the meaning of the Greek word. It s consistent with the concept behind the Greek word. This meaning and this concept fit very well with a resurrection of the body, in which body the believer will enter into eternal life in the Kingdom, which is quite probably envisioned, or understood by Jews, to be an earthly kingdom. Let’s then remember that Judaism up until the Hellenistic conquests was decidedly ambivalent, or ambiguous about any sort of afterlife. The idea of the immortal soul was Greek, and was clearly present already in Homer. My suggestion is that Paul and the evangelists were writing in terms of the salvation of the body, which could be resurrected at the proper moment. Remember that Paul was expecting Jesus’ return, or the Christ to come, at any moment. He expected to be alive when it happened. That is the plain meaning of 1 Thessalonians 4: “we who are still left alive” is the expression he uses. Then as time progressed, two things happened. More and more converts were pagan, many of them likely familiar with the Greek idea of the immortal soul. The second thing was that time progressed, it passed, moving the death of Jesus further and further back in time, so the idea of an imminent Return of Jesus, or Coming of the Lord/the Christ–which may not have been the same thing in Paul’s mind–seemed less and less likely. So the educated former pagans who took over much of the administration of the nascent Church slowly and subtly recast the salvation of the body into the salvation of the immortal soul.

It’s a thought. Like most of what I say, this is purely shooting from the hip without too much consideration aforethought. It’s a brainstorming session. For those of you unfamiliar with the corporate concept of a brainstorming session, all thoughts are good thoughts. Don’t preselect; just toss it out there to be considered more soberly at a later time. As always I’m not saying that my answer is correct, but I truly believe the question deserves to be asked. If the time should come when I have to eat these words? Oh well. With the proper seasoning no doubt they can be quite tasty. 

Now on to Samaria. Again, with a minimal amount of research, I learned that the actual capital of the former state of Israel was in the territory that comprised Samaria of the First Century. Boy howdy if that doesn’t support my thesis. This implies that the original temple was in Samaria, not in Jerusalem. In my reconstruction of the history, David was a bandit, or a rebel, who broke away from the Kingdom of Israel to found his own petty fiefdom centered on Jerusalem. The Israelites and the Judeans were from the same ethic-linguistic stem, but the Judeans either broke away from Israel, or founded Judea after the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians. The former possibility would account for the dynamic between Saul and David, but the latter scenario seems more plausible. Again this is from the hip and needs a whole lot of research to be taken seriously. Regardless, this proposed history provides the rationale behind the abiding antipathy the Judeans had for the Samaritans. The latter punctured the former’s claim to be the “real” worshippers of YHWH. And I suspect that the Judeans were correct in this, that they were the first group that elevated YHWH over other gods, and eventually (post Babylon?) posited YHWH as the supreme, and then only, God. As such, they had two reasons to hate the Samaritans. First, the latter had the benefit of priority; their temple was the first, but it was one temple amongst the temples of the various other gods worshipped in Israel. Second, the Judeans were the “purists” the group that had chosen the one God, which gave them cause to look down upon those who only came around at a later date.

Makes sense, given the way these things work themselves out in history. Is it accurate? That will be for others to debate. I’m way too late to that party.

John Chapter 4:15-24 (edit included)

Note: a minor edit in the translation was done on Verse 24 below. I changed it from the spirit of God” to “God is spirit”. This was an absolute rookie mistake, confusing the nominative case for the genitive. I was just flat not paying attention. Wonder how many more of these mistakes are littered through my translations. I shudder to think!

As we did for Chapter 3, I’ve included the last verse from the previous post to provide continuity.

Text

15 λέγει πρὸς αὐτὸν ἡ γυνή, Κύριε, δός μοι τοῦτο τὸ ὕδωρ, ἵνα μὴ διψῶ μηδὲ διέρχωμαι ἐνθάδε ἀντλεῖν. 

16 Λέγει αὐτῇ, Υπαγε φώνησον τὸν ἄνδρα σου καὶ ἐλθὲ ἐνθάδε.

17 ἀπεκρίθη ἡ γυνὴ καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ, Οὐκ ἔχω ἄνδρα. λέγει αὐτῇ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, Καλῶς εἶπας ὅτι Ἄνδρα οὐκ ἔχω:

18 πέντε γὰρ ἄνδρας ἔσχες, καὶ νῦν ὃν ἔχεις οὐκ ἔστιν σου ἀνήρ: τοῦτο ἀληθὲς εἴρηκας.

19 λέγει αὐτῷ ἡ γυνή, Κύριε, θεωρῶ ὅτι προφήτης εἶ σύ.

The woman said to him, “Master, give me this water, so that I never thirst, nor have to come here to draw water”. (16) He said to her, “Arise and call you husband (literally = your man) and come here”. (17) The woman answered and said to him/her/it, “I do not have a husband”. Jesus said to her, “You speak well, that ‘I do not have a husband’. (18) For you had five husbands, and now the one you have is not your husband. This you speak truly.” (19) The woman said to him, “Master, I behold that you are a prophet.” 

This bit seems a tad strange, like a bit of a non-sequitur. The two of them were having a discussion about living water, and suddenly Jesus is lecturing her on her loose morals. I confirmed the last part from some of the commentaries. In fact, Matthew Henry goes so far as to say that Jesus showed his human nature here, first teasing her about living water in a riddle that she did not understand, and then drawing her out on her husbands. To be honest, I’m not sure if this is a reference to serial marriages, or that she has just shacked up with these men, or at least with the current man who is not her husband. Matthew Henry says that Jesus has fallen into sin due to being tired from his journey, which causes him to provoke her. Interesting.

Of course the takeaway here is that the woman realizes Jesus as a prophet. Perhaps he is even greater than their father Jacob, who was, after all, not a prophet. One aspect of the exchange and her conclusion that catches my attention is that she comes to this realization only after he provides a detailed description of her domestic arrangements. This is different from interactions that Jesus has with other non-Jews in the other gospels. Naturally we are all aware that John is the author of “blessed is he who has not seen, and yet believes”. We have the example of the Centurion who knows that Jesus has but to say the word and his slave will be healed. This woman only comes to her understanding after Jesus has demonstrated his power. This makes him little different from a carnival huckster who makes “reads peoples’ minds” to convince them of their “ability”. At this point I’m not entirely sure what this means, so let’s read on.

15 Dicit ad eum mulier: “ Domine, da mihi hanc aquam, ut non sitiam neque veniam huc haurire ”.

16 Dicit ei: “ Vade, voca virum tuum et veni huc ”.

17 Respondit mulier et dixit ei: “ Non habeo virum ”. Dicit ei Iesus: “ Bene dixisti: “Non habeo virum”;

18 quinque enim viros habuisti, et nunc, quem habes, non est tuus vir. Hoc vere dixisti ”.

19 Dicit ei mulier: “ Domine, video quia propheta es tu.

20 οἱ πατέρες ἡμῶν ἐν τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ προσεκύνησαν: καὶ ὑμεῖς λέγετε ὅτι ἐν Ἱεροσολύμοις ἐστὶν ὁ τόπος ὅπου προσκυνεῖν δεῖ.

21 λέγει αὐτῇ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, Πίστευέ μοι, γύναι, ὅτι ἔρχεται ὥρα ὅτε οὔτε ἐν τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ οὔτε ἐν Ἱεροσολύμοις προσκυνήσετε τῷ πατρί.

22 ὑμεῖς προσκυνεῖτε ὃ οὐκ οἴδατε: ἡμεῖς προσκυνοῦμεν ὃ οἴδαμεν, ὅτι ἡ σωτηρία ἐκ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἐστίν.

23 ἀλλὰ ἔρχεται ὥρα, καὶ νῦν ἐστιν, ὅτε οἱ ἀληθινοὶ προσκυνηταὶ προσκυνήσουσιν τῷ πατρὶ ἐν πνεύματι καὶ ἀληθείᾳ: καὶ γὰρ ὁ πατὴρ τοιούτους ζητεῖ τοὺς προσκυνοῦντας αὐτόν.

24 πνεῦμα ὁ θεός, καὶ τοὺς προσκυνοῦντας αὐτὸν ἐν πνεύματι καὶ ἀληθείᾳ δεῖ προσκυνεῖν.

[the woman is still speaking:] “Our fathers on the this mountain prostrated themselves. And you (pl) say that in Jerusalem is the place where you were to grovel (or) you will grovel (or) where it is necessary to grovel. 

Let me stop to explain this. The first (or) indicates the ambiguity of the text that I have presented. The form could be an aorist subjunctive or a future indicative active. The first is impossible to render cleanly in English because it denotes both uncertainty, or obligation in the past, but it’s a simple past. English would require something like “where you should have worshipped”, using the perfect to imply continuous action rather than a single, one-and-done action as “where you worshipped”. I tend to believe that this is the tense and mood of the verb intended, to put across the idea of obligation that has occurred in the past. Now, “where you will worship” also works, but obviously we lose the concept that this is what has been happening (perfect progressive) up to this point. The final choice “where it is necessary to worship” is a completely different tense & mood, and it comes from a different mss tradition than the first choice of readings. The construction is impersonal, and “it is necessary + infinitive” is pretty much the direct translation. Personally, I would guess that the first tradition of the first two choices is apt to be the more accurate due to the ambiguity of tense/voice. It was, I suspect, precisely this that led a later copyist to clarify the reading by changing the text to “it is necessary to”. Even more interesting is that the Latin also reads the impersonal “it is necessary to”. I’m curious which came first: the Latin or the Greek? By rights, it should be the Greek, but this would mean that the textual change occurred very early, prior to 382 CE. That strikes me as rather too early for divergent mss traditions, but I say that in complete ignorance of said traditions. 

One other point to be made concerns “prostrate themselves”. This is invariably translated as “worship”, but that does not begin to capture the tone of the Greek verb. The verb is a compound of the preposition pros and kynēsis which means something like “act like a dog”. Put together, you get a verb that means “act like a dog in front of (someone)”. The implication is to adopt a submissive posture, like a dog lying on its back and exposing its belly. That is the literal meaning. In practice the concept is “to prostrate”, or even “to grovel”. Note that the word is the same in both places, but I have chosen to render the one as “prostrate” and the second as “grovel”. This word has a deep history in Greek language and thought, dating from the time of Alexander the Great. While he was king of Macedon, he was more or less looked upon as a primus inter pares, a first among equals. He was due respect, but his subjects treated him like a human and did not kneel in his presence. That is, they showed respect, but did not venerate him. However, as his armies moved east and conquered the Persians they ran into an entirely different set of customs. Before the Persian King, the Great King, one fell upon one’s face, one prostrated oneself in the King’s presence. This tradition was very old in the ancient Near East, dating back to the kings of Mesopotamia, such as the Babylonians and Assyrians and even prior. This is the action implied, or captured by the term proskynēsis. When he had the assumed the throne of Persia and becoming the Great King, Alexander accepted this form of behavior from his Asian subjects, for whom it was standard practice that dated back centuries. This is one of the things that Greeks despised about the Asian kings such as Xerxes, that such groveling was required of their subjects. For the Greeks, this was not proper behaviour for a human to show before another human. However, at some point after becoming Great King, Alexander began to encourage, and finally to require that his Graeco-Macedonian subjects perform this ritual in his presence. This greatly offended Greek sensibilities, and this sort of attitude is one of the reasons put forward by those who argue that Alexander was murdered, poisoned. I tend to doubt this because the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kings of Egypt and the Near East made such groveling standard practice in the presence of the king. 

Anyway, the point is that the word has a very negative connotation in Greek. Even in English, grovel is rather an ugly word; and whether it’s less offensive than prostrate oneself, the latter does not provide quite the visceral gut-punch that grovel has. This being established, we have to ask what the word brought to mind for those who wrote or heard this word in this context. One one hand, this gospel was written in that part of the world where the practice of proskynesis had been in use for a very long time. OTOH, if anything, Jews were probably more appalled by the practice than Greeks of the time were. By the First Century I would guess that most pagans in the Eastern half of the Empire had come to terms with the practice; it would take a bit longer in the Wester half. Did the same change of attitude affect the Jews as well? Or the other possibility is that the word had become more or less neutralized, at least to some extent, losing the sense of groveling and replacing it with the sense of worship, as a more neutral term? We in the modern world more or less accept the idea of worshipping a deity even if there are those who find the idea debasing. 

In the final analysis, this word is used quite frequently in the NT, and it is almost (?) always translated as “worship”, which we interpret through our modern lens. Not sure why I haven’t brought this up before; the opportunity has certainly presented itself, but there you are.

As a final word, this dispute about where one must worship really supports my contention, I think, that the enmity between Jews and Samaritans was based on politics in the final analysis. The politics was expressed in religious terms, but the clear compartmentalization of these two realms had scarcely begun to start. “The Reformation was not wholly, or even primarily, a religious event”. (That may not be the exact quote, but it’s darn close.) That is the opening sentence of a book I read while working on Martin Luther. I no longer remember the author or the title, but I do remember the publisher: Eerdmans, of Grand Rapids, Mich. I remember these because I am from Michigan, and I went to school with a family or two whose last name was Erdman. Grand Rapids is a center of the Dutch Reformed (i.e. Calvinist) Church, and Eerdmans is a prominent publisher of Protestant academia. IOW, the sentiment expressed was not that of a Catholic acting as an apologist for the Roman Rite. I mention this quote for two reasons. First, it is a terribly important realization for understanding both the Reformation and everything that came after it. The separation of Church and State was a very new idea when Luther posted his 95 theses. It had only arisen in the later Middle Ages as the nascent nation-states of France and England sought to curb the political influence of the Pope; thus, the concept of this separation was created by the secular side of the coin. Second, arising from the profundity of the insight, we need to be careful about how we as moderns view the religious issues of previous eras. This has not happened in the discussion of the enmity between Jews and Samaritans. It was a religious dispute. End of story. But I don’t believe this. And there is more. 

Now, we hear about the dispute from the Jewish side. Samaritans, after all, more or less vanish from the historical record even more thoroughly than Israel. After Simon Magus, he of Acts who was reputed to be the founder of Gnosticism by several ancient authors, there are no prominent Samaritans, or even anyone recognized as such (well…maybe don’t take that entirely literally…) So what we get is the Jewish side, and we know the antipathy of the Jews, that it was profound and deep. Why? To my mind it arises from Judea’s fundamental realization that Samaria, as part of the erstwhile Israel, actually had the superior claim to being the proper location of the worship of the national God/god–whether or not that god/God was YHWH. Or perhaps the more accurate statement would be that the Samaritans, who supposedly were not forced into relocation by the Assyrians had the oldest continuous site for the worship of YHWH. Part of my suggestion is that Samaria, tucked away into the NW corner of the ancient state, remained loyal yo YHWH while the more cosmopolitan urban centers reverted to the pervasive worship of the Canaanite gods. IOW. It’s something of a defensive attitude Of course, demonstrating this one way or the other would require large amounts of research that likely would demonstrate that the proposition cannot be validated in either direction. The date of the founding of the Judean kingdom as a breakaway province from the larger Israel would have to be examined as well. This would include considering evidence of when, or if, Judea was a focus of the worship of YHWH from the origin. 

So there you have it. Rank, rampant speculation. But, once again, the point is not my suggested solution, but the asking of the question.

20 Patres nostri in monte hoc adoraverunt, et vos dicitis quia in Hierosolymis est locus, ubi adorare oportet ”

21 λέγει αὐτῇ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, Πίστευέ μοι, γύναι, ὅτι ἔρχεται ὥρα ὅτε οὔτε ἐν τῷ ὄρει τούτῳ οὔτε ἐν Ἱεροσολύμοις προσκυνήσετε τῷ πατρί.

22 ὑμεῖς προσκυνεῖτε ὃ οὐκ οἴδατε: ἡμεῖς προσκυνοῦμεν ὃ οἴδαμεν, ὅτι ἡ σωτηρία ἐκ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἐστίν.

23 ἀλλὰ ἔρχεται ὥρα, καὶ νῦν ἐστιν, ὅτε οἱ ἀληθινοὶ προσκυνηταὶ προσκυνήσουσιν τῷ πατρὶ ἐν πνεύματι καὶ ἀληθείᾳ: καὶ γὰρ ὁ πατὴρ τοιούτους ζητεῖ τοὺς προσκυνοῦντας αὐτόν.

24 πνεῦμα ὁ θεός, καὶ τοὺς προσκυνοῦντας αὐτὸν ἐν πνεύματι καὶ ἀληθείᾳ δεῖ προσκυνεῖν.

Jesus said to her, “Believe me, woman, that the hour comes that neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the father. (22) You will worship (perform proskynesis) what you do not know, we will worship what we do know, which is the salvation of the Jews. (23) But the hour comes and it is now, that the faithful ones/the ones following truth (who are) worshipping, worship the father in spirit and truth; for the father seeks them worshipping him. (24) God is spirit, and his worshippers in spirit and truth must worship (i.e., must worship in this way).

First, every translation of “worship” comes from the Greek proskynesis. I think it’s worthwhile keeping in mind what the underlying implication is. Just as it’s important to remember that doulos means slave, and not “servant”. Paul was not the “servant of God”; he was the slave of God.

Second, he’s telling the Samaritan woman that she, and all her kin, will be worshipping what the Jews currently worship, i.e. the salvation of the Jews. IOW, the Samaritans will soon find out they were wrong. Does this mean that the Samaritans will join in the salvation of the Jews? That is, will they more or less convert by giving up their erroneous worship and merging with the Judean worship in Jerusalem? At least one of the commentators I checked did ascribe this statement being put the way it is to a certain amount of anti-Samaritan bias, and that is easy to believe. I also learned that the Samaritans accepted the Torah, but not the books of the prophets, so there were new things that the Samaritans would be worshipping. So, in effect, the Samaritans would become Jews. Of course, this would soon give way to a wider circle of worshippers, those who would worship in “spirit and truth”. The father himself would search out such worshippers. Interesting to note that this idea of the initiative coming from On High is a foreshadow of the later idea of Predestination, where God takes the initiative for our salvation. 

Now let’s talk about that for a moment. Salvation. What does the word mean? First, let us be aware that our word derives from Latin rather than Greek. In Greek, the term is sōtēr. But for this exercise, we’re going to start with the later history of the word. In Latin, the base word is salveo, the meaning most closely tied to health; aside from that, it was sort of a generic used for greetings or such. However, other forms of the word did come into existence, but later, and most of them were tied to the writing of the Vulgate. That is, the words are Christian in origin, so trying to go back to the older meaning of the word doesn’t really do us much good. It comes to be a term for deliverance, or a saviour, as we understand the term. When this happens, however, there is a very important caveat to bear in mind: we know what some of these words mean by triangulating* various uses and then extrapolating meanings that are meaningful and so building up a lexical field for a given word. When the word is late, and only appears in one source, what happens is that the meaning of the word will start to change over time. So the definition, or understanding of what a salvator is will depend on the theology of the person reading word at the time of the reading. Someone in the 4th Century could read the word and understand one thing, but another person reading the word 300 years later will likely have a different understanding of the word because the ideas implied by salvation, and saviour, will have changed in the interim. And let’s be clear that this sort of evolution of religious terms did happen. The best example is pneuma, or spiritus. In the earlier English translations the word often became ghost, from the German geist; obviously, a word from an entirely different language will have very different connotations. But even before that, the pneuma evolved into spiritus–which is fine, lots of similarities. At some point, however, it became Spiritus, and Spirit, and the capitalization matters a lot. So, if pneuma underwent this transition, we would be foolish to assume that other words did not.

This is a genuine concern because the transition from sōtēr to salvator saw a change in the concept expressed. Hellenistic kings such as the Seleucids and the Ptolemies often adopted the term Sōtēr as part of their royal title. Now, one would think that a secular, royal saviour is rather a different concept than the Christian saviour. But here, I think, is where we get tangled up in the idea of the resurrection of the body. I need to provide some evidence for this, but we have come across times and places in our readings where the kingdom to come sure seems like it’s going to happen here on earth. That is, it would be our body that would inhabit the kingdom having come rather than our immortal soul as became the common understanding. As used in pagan Greek, a sōtēr generally saves a person’s life, or way of life or something such. The idea of saving the immortal soul of someone else was probably an alien concept. The Egyptians certainly held beliefs of differential treatment in the afterlife based on an individual’s actions in the current life, but there was no saviour figure i. either Egyptian pr Greek myth. That is an innovation of Christianity. Given that, it is impossible to say with certainty what John–or Paul or any of the others meant by the term. Obviously, we know what it came to mean, but maybe not so much in this instance in John.

Whoa! Stop the presses! I just looked at Strong’s words and found that sōtēr and sōtēria are words that are not found in either Mark or Matthew and only once in in John. Since this has already gone on too long, I’m going to stop and publish. Then I’m going to write up special posts on Samaritans and salvation/saviour. These may end up as one post if Samaria doesn’t go on too long; otherwise, they will be separate. 

Your patience and indulgence is appreciated! 

(* Triangulate: Literally implies three points, but the more common words have well more than three occurrences. But I have yet to see dodekahedroning–12–a position. Just so you know that I know.)

21 Dicit ei Iesus: “Crede mihi, mulier, quia venit hora, quando neque in monte hoc neque in Hierosolymis adorabitis Patrem.

22 Vos adoratis, quod nescitis; nos adoramus, quod scimus, quia salus ex Iudaeis est.

23 Sed venit hora, et nunc est, quando veri adoratores adorabunt Patrem in Spiritu et veritate; nam et Pater tales quaerit, qui adorent eum.

24 Spiritus est Deus, et eos, qui adorant eum, in Spiritu et veritate oportet adorare “.

 

John Chapter 4:9-15

(1/22/23: now includes minor edits for narrative clarity)

The first post on this chapter described the scene. Jesus, traveling from Judea/Jerusalem to Galilee passes through Samaria. While there, at Jacob’s Well, he asks a Samaritan woman to give him a drink of the water. The conversation ensues below. There are really no natural breaks in the conversation, so the commentary may end up being a bit disjointed by this. My apologies in advance. 

Text

9 λέγει οὖν αὐτῷ ἡ γυνὴ ἡ Σαμαρῖτις, Πῶς σὺ Ἰουδαῖος ὢν παρ’ ἐμοῦ πεῖν αἰτεῖς γυναικὸς Σαμαρίτιδος οὔσης; {οὐ γὰρ συγχρῶνται Ἰουδαῖοι Σαμαρίταις.}

10 ἀπεκρίθη Ἰησοῦς καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῇ, Εἰ ᾔδεις τὴν δωρεὰν τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ τίς ἐστιν ὁ λέγων σοι, Δός μοι πεῖν, σὺ ἂν ᾔτησας αὐτὸν καὶ ἔδωκεν ἄν σοι ὕδωρ ζῶν.

So the Samaritan woman said to him (Jesus), “How is it you being a Jew ask to drink from me, being a Samaritan woman {for Jews did not have dealings with Samaritans.} (10) Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God and what I am saying to you, ‘Give me to drink’, you asked for it and I gave you living water”.   

I have to stop to comment on the grammar. Notice that I rendered the verbs in Jesus’ reply as past tense, and notice how this doesn’t make a lot of sense in English. But there it is. The two verbs are aorists, connoting a single action completed in the past. All of the English translations include “would”, as in “if you would have asked for it and I would have given you living water”. That is, these are conditional verbs, meant to indicate a state of unreality. She/he would have asked/given, but indeed they did not. While you may recall my speculation about the Ancient Greeks having a different sense of time than we have, this is not actually an issue of time, such as past vs present; rather, it’s a distinction of reality, what did happen vs what may have/could have happened. At present, I’m really not able to puzzle out what the implication is. Honestly, it may just be a situation where our evangelist wasn’t quite up to snuff in his Greek. 

As for the actual content of the conversation, I will reserve comment.

9 Dicit ergo ei mulier illa Samaritana: “ Quomodo tu, Iudaeus cum sis, bibere a me poscis, quae sum mulier Samaritana? ”. Non enim coutuntur Iudaei Samaritanis.

10 Respondit Iesus et dixit ei: “ Si scires donum Dei, et quis est, qui dicit tibi: “Da mihi bibere”, tu forsitan petisses ab eo, et dedisset tibi aquam vivam ”.

11 λέγει αὐτῷ [ἡ γυνή], Κύριε, οὔτε ἄντλημα ἔχεις καὶ τὸ φρέαρ ἐστὶν βαθύ: πόθεν οὖν ἔχεις τὸ ὕδωρ τὸ ζῶν;

12 μὴ σὺ μείζων εἶ τοῦ πατρὸς ἡμῶν Ἰακώβ, ὃς ἔδωκεν ἡμῖν τὸ φρέαρ καὶ αὐτὸς ἐξ αὐτοῦ ἔπιεν καὶ οἱ υἱοὶ αὐτοῦ καὶ τὰ θρέμματα αὐτοῦ;

[The woman] said to him, “Lord, you do not have a bucket for drawing water and the well is deep. How do you have living water? (12) Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave to us this well and himself drank from it and his children (sons) and his cattle?

This brings up a point. “Our father Jacob” is the statement of the belief held by both Jews and Samaritans that they shared a common ancestor. Jacob, a.k.a. Israel, had twelve sons. In the language of ancient legend, this means that a number of people(s) traced their ancestry back to him. Before going any further, we need to be clear that the terms Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew(ish) should not be considered as synonymous. To do so is the major crime committed by historians of the ancient Near East. Until about 40 years ago, it was taken as given that the Hebrew Scriptures are essentially historically accurate; as such, writing the history of this area consisted mainly of re-writing said Scriptures. This was aided and abetted by the habit of conflating a lot of things into a pre-ordained mold. For example, there are mentions of a House of Omri, and even a House of David in non-biblical sources. The two or three examples are scant mentions in a longer text, usually listing a number of peoples and/or kingdoms. They provide very little context other than to establish a terminus ante quem, a point after which we can talk about either of these (presumably, or at least possibly) royal houses. What these mentions do NOT do is to validate anything other than the bare existence of such a house at a given time. Just because there was a House of David, we cannot take this as proof of the Unified Monarchy under David and Solomon that then split into the two states of Israel and Judah. However, this is precisely what historians have been doing for the last five or six centuries in which history has come to exist as a bona fide academic subject. 

But wait, there’s more. This extrapolation of the entire HS from a handful of names on a list is the basis; what makes it work to some degree is the conflation I have been discussing. “Hebrew” is the term for a group of Semitic-speakers who coalesced into a more or less distinctive group within the broader group of Semitic speakers. “Israelite” refers to members of a specific political entity, the State of Israel. “Jewish” is a bit tougher to pin down; the root is “Judean”, which is a political designation in the same way as Israelite. Judeans were the citizens of the political entity known as Judea. It is likely that the great majority of Israelites and Judeans were Hebrews, but there is no reason to believe that all Hebrews were those who coalesced into the two states mentioned. The term “Hebrew” crops up a number of times in Egyptian texts, some of them dating back, perhaps, to the end of the Bronze Age, but certainly to the Iron Age. The etymology and the precise meaning of the word is debated. It seems to imply people who are not native to Egypt, ones that are passing through, or perhaps enemies, or maybe even just “foreigner”. That is, the term is imprecise. This vagueness can explain the occurrence of the term in the Second Millennium BCE, before there was a state of Israel. The use of the term does not necessarily mean we are talking about Semitic-speakers, although that may be pushing it too far. From the scant evidence I’ve seen, the Egyptians used the word to mean “those people over there”, i.e., on the other side of Sinai.  The use of the term in this way could indicate that those dwelling across the Sinai actually used the term of themselves and the Egyptians took their name as a generic for “foreigner”. Based solely on probability, it is somewhat more likely that the term originated with the (proto-)Hebrews than with the Egyptians. This is why we cannot find a group of people calling themselves “Peoples of the Sea”; the term is a label imposed by Egyptians. 

Some Hebrews did settle into the areas that came to be the states of Israel and Judah/Judea. The members of the two states were likely connected to some degree by language and ethnic background, of which language is the key marker. However, this does not mean that they shared a common religion, let alone that both states should be considered as being forebears of what became Judaism. Indeed, the very term “Jewish” indicates that this term originates in Judah and not Israel. The state of Israel seems to have been of some consequence, hence the reference to the House of Omri. However, it disappeared after its conquest by Assyria in 721. Doubtless refugees fled and settled in Judah, where a common language was helpful The Assyrians did not continue to conquer Judah, whether because unrest in the homeland drew them back, or they decided that it was not worth the time an effort to conquer a rather poor, small kingdom situated in hills making it easily defensible. It was, IMO, sometime after this that the Judeans came up with the story of the United Monarchy. By absorbing refugees from Israel, they attempted to absorb a claim to the lands of the State of Israel. The United Monarchy was a great way to legitimize such a claim, and such pretexts were important in traditional societies where heritage and, well, tradition mattered.

The reason the Assyrians and Babylonians and other ancient empires relocated conquered peoples was to break the latters’ connexion to their ancestral soil. This meant the land where their forebears were interred, and usually meant the connexion to the local/tribal deity. It is important to recognize that many deities were, in fact, local, in the sense that they were tied to a specific location. We find this in Book 1 of Livy, where Aeneas becomes Iuppiter Indiges, the Local Jove. Many (most) of the Greek deities have an epithet that ties them to a specific place, such as Athene Alea, a town in the Peloponnese. By removing conquered peoples from their native locations, the idea was to assimilate them into the larger empire. For the most part, this is what seems to have happened to the Israelites. Aside from their prominence in the HS, Israel and her people pretty much vanish from the historical record. [Note: I have not yet worked out the whole of history as presented in the HS; that is a major undertaking that will take some time.] Suffice it to say that neither Greeks nor Romans (nor Persians?) mention Israel. The denizens of Judah, however, did not suffer this fate and arguably came back stronger than ever. I would in fact argue that it was likely that the Babylonian Captivity was the event that created Judaism. Whereas Israel had remained largely pagan and so was more easily persuaded to abandon their local gods, the Judeans rallied ’round YHWH, disassociating YHWH from a specific place and raising him to the status of a universal God. I would suggest that when Ezra read the Law to the denizens of Jerusalem as told in the book of Nehemiah, this was the first reading of the Torah and prophets to a people who could probably now properly be called Jewish. 

However, that’s a long digression to the main point: Jews and Samaritans recognized a common ancestor.  Note that Samaria is geographically part of what had been the State of Israel. A quick Google tells me that they claimed they had not been deported by the Assyrians. As such, their claim to have the “correct” spot for the Temple carries some prima facie validity. However, this all goes back to the question of whether, or perhaps when the Samaritans, as descendants of Israel, did in fact worship YHWH. According to the theories I’ve just expounded they did not, so their claim to primacy of the worship of YHWH throws a monkey wrench into my argument. That’s OK. It’s why I added the caveat that I have not worked all of this out. But it does certainly explain why the Jews were so adamant in their dislike of Samaritans. As the  true descendants of Israel, it was they–and not the Judeans–who had the claim to the extensive lands of the former state. Now, in practice, this amounted to little since a claim is just words until it’s backed up by force, but the “balkanization” of the various states of the former Yugoslavia, which fought a series of bloody wars in the 1990s should remind us that the claim itself has consequences. The different place of worship is a symptom of the situation, not the cause itself.

There is so much more to this but we need to get back to the actual subject at hand. I was going to discuss the significance of the common ancestor being Jacob, but time has told me it’s not that important. It just remains to be noted that, of course, the woman does not understand what Jesus is saying, or implying. Rather, she takes him literally. Of course she does; she is the set-up person for the coming punchline. But let’s not be so flippant about this. Yes, the formulaic nature of the text is, well, a formula*, but that’s not to say it has no value, or no validity. The function is to be instructional; so by presenting a “blank slate” interlocutor, the evangelist is able to allow Jesus to present his lesson in a clear manner.

*I’ve never quite gotten the value of form-criticism, either. As far as I can tell, the primary benefit of this is to create another diversion that allows scholarly discussion about anything other than the text at hand.

11 Dicit ei mulier: “ Domine, neque in quo haurias habes, et puteus altus est; unde ergo habes aquam vivam?

12 Numquid tu maior es patre nostro Iacob, qui dedit nobis puteum, et ipse ex eo bibit et filii eius et pecora eius? ”.

13 ἀπεκρίθη Ἰησοῦς καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῇ, Πᾶς ὁ πίνων ἐκ τοῦ ὕδατος τούτου διψήσει πάλιν:

14 ὃς δ’ ἂν πίῃ ἐκ τοῦ ὕδατος οὗ ἐγὼ δώσω αὐτῷ, οὐ μὴ διψήσει εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα, ἀλλὰ τὸ ὕδωρ ὃ δώσω αὐτῷ γενήσεται ἐν αὐτῷ πηγὴ ὕδατος ἁλλομένου εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον.

15 λέγει πρὸς αὐτὸν ἡ γυνή, Κύριε, δός μοι τοῦτο τὸ ὕδωρ, ἵνα μὴ διψῶ μηδὲ διέρχωμαι ἐνθάδε ἀντλεῖν.

Jesus answered and said to her, “All who are drinking this water will thirst again; (14) but he who may have drunk from the water which I give to him/her/it (gender is indeterminate; ending can be any of the three), he will not thirst forever, but the water which I give to him/her/it will become in the presence of that well springing into eternal life”. (15) The woman said to him, “Master, give to me that water, so that I will not thirst nor pass through there to draw water.”

The grammar of that last passage is a bit tortured, but the meaning is clear enough. No amount of messing with prepositions or verb tenses or moods is really going to obscure what is being said. One quibble I have is with the translation of kyrie as “Sir”. The word means “lord” or “master”. For those of certain traditions, kyrie eleison is familiar from church services. Lately I’ve been attending a Very High Church Episcopalian service, replete with incense and bells, that has a truly excellent choir that sings in Latin, or in the case of the kyrie, Greek. My biggest problem with “sir” is that it is grossly anachronistic. The title, heck the concept of “sir” was not invented until more than half a millennium after these words were written. It’s Mediaeval, used for knights, and neither existed until sometime around the 9th Century. There is a whole study on the introduction of the stirrup around the time of Charlemagne, an invention that made what is called “shock combat” possible on a horse. Prior to the stirrup, it was impossible to ride at someone with a leveled lance or spear and stab the opponent without being thrown off your own horse. Without stirrups, it is necessary to grip the horse’s body with the inside of the rider’s legs, and a sudden jolt such as the one caused by running into another person would push the rider delivering the blow from his own horse. If you want the whole story on this, see a book called Mediaeval Technology and Social Change by Lynn White. It is probably impossible to overstate the value of this book regarding the introduction of the stirrup and the invention of the heavy plough in the centuries around Charlemagne (give or take). The book is absolutely thorough. Published in 1962, it is still THE standard work, the last word, on these two subjects. 
So yeah, “sir”…no. Just no.

I’m going to post without comment on the actual content. I think it’s still best to wait until we’ve gotten a bit more of this behind us. 

13 Respondit Iesus et dixit ei: “ Omnis, qui bibit ex aqua hac, sitiet iterum;

14 qui autem biberit ex aqua, quam ego dabo ei, non sitiet in aeternum; sed aqua, quam dabo ei, fiet in eo fons aquae salientis in vitam aeternam ”.

15 Dicit ad eum mulier: “Domine, da mihi hanc aquam, ut non sitiam neque veniam huc haurire”.