Woman at the Well, part 3

I’ve had a pretty stressful day today and while moping about at work my friend said, “Are you working on your Mormon blog? Because that always makes you happy.” That really made me feel like what I’m doing makes a difference, even if it’s just with myself and my mood.

I was doing a little bit of research about the Samaritan woman at the well to see if anyone else had the same thoughts that I did about her background during their study of the scriptures, and I came across a really interesting website where a group of people were discussing this topic and had some thought provoking insight. The first insight that they had that I thought was interesting was “marriage happens when men meet women by wells.” The first guy suggested that Jesus was genuinely looking for a woman to marry, and while I don’t agree with that line of thinking, Christ being married to the Church is a pretty constant theme throughout the scriptures, and while I was thinking about this, I thought that maybe Christ was looking for a bride in that sense that if he’s married to the Church, then he’d be looking for people who want to join with the Church, like he’s looking for people to join his family. I also thought that joining the Church or committing to the gospel is the same type of commitment as marriage, because it’s all consuming, it changes who you are, what you do, how you act and think, etc. To be successful, a marriage needs lots of work, and for a testimony to grow and a life to change through the gospel, it takes a lot of work as well. So in that aspect, we could look at it like he was assessing her ability to be his “wife” in the Church, if that makes sense.

The other point that really drove home what I was talking about yesterday was that this well “is the same plot of ground where Dinah was raped.” Symbolism is very important throughout the scriptures and we all know that many times the Savior does certain things in certain places in order to teach his people in different ways. The article quotes Genesis 33:18 – 34:  which says, “And Jacob same to Shalem, and city of Shechem, which is in the land of Canaan, when he came from Padan-aram; and pitched his tent before the city. 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. And he erected there an altar, and called it El-elohe-Israel.” I was looking for a map that would show both places and see exactly where they are in relation to each other, but the more I think about it, anciently the world wasn’t like it is today, just one giant expanse of places and people that just roll together. A “plot of land’ would probably mean that area or community, as they were probably pretty small. It’s probable that this place was known as the place where Dinah was raped. Here on this map is Jacob’s well in yellow which is where the conversation between Jesus and the woman takes place, and Shechem is in green which is the place where Dinah lived. The account of Dinah is continued, “And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went to see the daughters of the land. And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.”

I think that the fact that Jesus’s conversation with this woman with certain background in this exact place is significant and lends credibility to my thoughts about what this situation is really speaking to. The article sums up my thinking of this woman’s background in a much more elegant way, saying, “Like many women (and men, too) who are ‘looking for love in all the wrong places,’ the Samaritan woman was looking for love, and she had been married and divorced five times by the time she met Jesus in the heat of the midday sun. She was likely drawing water at the time in order to avoid the town gossip who gathered at the well to draw water in the early morning coolness. Jesus asked her to bring her husband to the well because he knew what her current living situation was. Moreover, Jesus knew she was looking for true satisfaction but would never find it without changing her modus operandi. Jesus’ comment about thirsting again and again for physical water was his way of pinpointing her need for the living water of which he spoke, the only water which would quench the spiritual thirst she felt within her inmost being, and not only in the here and now, but also in eternity.”