Exodus 17:1-7
John 4:5-42
“Busted!”
A woman of Samaria came to draw water from a well, and Jesus said to her, basically, “May I have a drink, please?”
The most direct route north to Galilee was through the region of Samaria, yet the typical good Jew of Jesus’ day would often take the long way around just to avoid this area. The problem with Samaria was the people who lived there. They were not “good Jews.” They were not pure Jews by heredity; they were Jews who had been ethnically mixed over generations of inter-marriages with people of the Arab race. Folks in Samaria were not even faithfully practicing the Hebrew religion but were combining Judaism with vestiges of their earlier roots in pagan religions. Such religious practices made them ritually impure in the eyes of the “good” Jews of Jesus’ day, so when it came to religious matters it was best for a practicing Jew to just avoid them.
