Jacob's Well

“Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well: and it was about the sixth hour.”John 4:6 · KJV

“And he bought a parcel of a field, where he had spread his tent, at the hand of the children of Hamor, Shechem’s father, for an hundred pieces of money.”Genesis 33:19 · KJV

Jesus, tired from the road, sat down on the edge of a well Jacob had dug seventeen centuries earlier, and asked a Samaritan woman for a drink. She had come at noon, the hottest hour, to avoid the other women.

He offered her the site's own verse before it was written: “whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst” (John 4:14). A Samaritan, a woman, an outsider on every count Israel counted, at the oldest well in the Bible, and to her, first, He said plainly, “I that speak unto thee am he” (4:26). The first person Jesus told outright that He was the Messiah was a Gentile woman with five failed marriages, drawing water alone at noon. Whosoever means her.