Charles Ellicott Commentary John 4

When therefore the Lord knew.—The second clause of this verse is given in the exact words of the report which came to the Pharisees: When therefore the Lord knew that the Pharisees heard, “Jesus maketh and baptizeth more disciples than John.”

The report which reached John (John 3:26) had come to them also, and the inference from His retirement is that it had excited their hostility. The hour to meet this has not yet come, and He withdraws to make, in a wider circle, the announcement which He has made in the Temple, in Jerusalem, in Judea, and is about to make in Samaria and in Galilee.

Though Jesus himself baptized not.—This is a correction, not of the writer’s statement, but of the report carried to the Pharisees. The form of the report is quite natural. John did personally baptize, and when multitudes thronged him, it is probable that his disciples assisted. Greater numbers still (John 3:26) were thronging to the baptism administered ministerially by the disciples of Jesus. (Acts 19:5; 1 Corinthians 1:15–17.)

They had been drawn to Him by His teaching and miracles in Jerusalem and the surrounding country, and they spoke of receiving His baptism. But the writer cannot let the report appear in his Gospel without correction. There was a reason which they did not know for the fact that Jesus did not baptize with water, for it was He “which baptiseth with the Holy Spirit” (John 1:33), and this power His disciples had not yet received (John 7:39).

Again.—This word is almost certainly part of the original text, though it is not found in some manuscripts. Its omission is due to a difficulty of interpretation. What is the previous return into Galilee? The only one mentioned in this Gospel is that of John 1:43. We have had another note of time in John 3:24, from which we learn that this Judean period of the ministry preceded the imprisonment of John, and therefore the commencement of the Galilean ministry recorded in Matthew 4:12 (see Note there) and Mark 1:14. This second return, then, is the starting-point of the history of our Lord’s work in Galilee as told by the earlier Gospels.

He must needs go through Samaria—that is, following the shortest and most usual road, and the one we find Him taking from Galilee to Jerusalem (Luke 9:52; see Note there). Josephus spoke of this as the customary way of the Galileans going up during the feasts at Jerusalem (Antiquities 20.6.1). The Pharisees, indeed, took the longer road through Perea, to avoid contact with the country and people of Samaria, but it is within the purpose of His life and work (“needs go,” that is, it was necessary that He should go) to teach in Samaria, as in Judea, the principles of true religion and worship, which would cut away the foundations of all local jealousies and feuds and establish for all nations the spiritual service of the universal Father (John 4:21–24).

The “Samaria” of this chapter is the province into which the older kingdom had degenerated, and which took its name from the capital city. This was the Shomĕron built by Omri, on a hill purchased from Shemer (1 Kings 16:23–24). The city was given by Augustus to Herod the Great, who rebuilt it, and called it after the Emperor, Sebaste, a name which survives in the modern village Sebustiêh.

Sychar involves questions of greater uncertainty. The reading may be regarded as beyond doubt, the attempts to substitute “Sychem,” or “Sichem” being obviously made to avoid the topographical difficulty.

The older geographers, followed by many modern commentators, suppose the word to be an intentional variation of the word Sychem, by which the Jews expressed their contempt for the city of the Samaritans, the sound being very nearly that of the Hebrew words for “lie” and “drunken.” Others suppose the change of termination is a natural dialectic variation. (Compare Ben, the Hebrew for son, as in Benjamin,Genesis 35:18, which in the later language became Bar, as in Simon Bar-Jona, Matthew 16:17.)

These explanations assume that Sychar is the same place as Shechem; but it is very improbable that St. John would have spoken of a city so well known as Shechem with the prefix “which is called,” or would have thought it necessary to define it as “near to the parcel of ground . . . .” The only other places with the same prefix are Ephraim (John 11:54), the Pavement (John 19:13), and Golgotha (John 19:17). However, in the latter instances, as in the mention of Thomas called Didymus (John 11:16; John 20:24), the words do not imply a soubriquet (compare Farrar, Life of Christ, i. 206, note, and Grove in Smith’s Dictionary of Bible, “Sychar”), but are a citation of the names in Hebrew and Greek, for the benefit of Greek readers.

To assert that Sychar is meant to convey a double meaning is to imply that this would be understood by readers for whom it is necessary to translate Gabbatha and Golgotha, Thomas and Cephas (John 1:42), for whom Messias has been rendered in Greek in John 1:41, and is to be again in this very discourse (John 4:25). Shechem, moreover, was then known by the Greek name Neapolis, which has become the present Naplûs (see Ewald in loc., and compare Josephus, Wars, iv.), and this name would have been as natural in this Gospel as, e.g., Tiberias, which is found in it only (John 6:1; John 6:23; John 21:1). Nor can it be said that Shechem was near to Jacob’s well, for admitting that the old city extended considerably “farther eastward than at present,” it must still have been more than a mile distant.

As early as the fourth century, Sychar was distinguished from Shechem by Eusebius, Jerome, and the Bordeaux Pilgrim, and the name also occurs in the Talmud. (See quotations in Wieseler’s Synopsis, p. 231 of the English Translation.) It is still found in the modern village Askar, about half a mile north from Jacob’s well.

A plan and description of the neighbourhood, by Dr. Rosen, Prussian Consul at Jerusalem, appeared in the Journal of the German Oriental Society (xiv. 634), and the results of this are now accessible to the English reader in the translation of Caspari’s Introduction (p. 124). (Compare Dr. Thomson’s The Land and the Book,John 31.) The identification is accepted by Ewald, Godet, and Luthardt, among modern writers.

Mr. Grove (Article “Sychar,” as above), inclines to it, but, as he says, “there is an etymological difficulty . . . ‘Askar begins with the letter ‘Ain, which Sychar does not appear to have contained; a letter too stubborn and enduring to be easily either dropped or assumed in a name.” One is tempted to think it possible that this ‘Ain is the first letter of the word for Spring or Fountain, the plural of which occurs in Ænon, in John 3:23, and that ‘A-Sychar (well of Sychar) = ‘Askar.

The parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph.—The reference is to the blessing of Joseph in Genesis 48:22, which is translated by Kalisch, “And I give to thee one portion above thy brethren, which I take out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my bow.” The patriarch is confident that he will, in his posterity, drive out the Amorite and possess the land promised him by God (John 4:4; John 4:21).

In that land there is a portion where Abraham had raised his first altar, and received the first promise that his seed should possess that land (Genesis 12:6–7).

That portion had been his own first halting-place on his return from Padan-aram; and he, too, had erected an altar there, in a parcel of a field where his tent rested, which he bought for a hundred pieces of money, and made it sacred to El, the God of Israel (Genesis 33:18–20). It comes to his mind now, when in the last days of his life he looks on to the future and back to the past, and he gives it to his own and Rachel’s son.

The Hebrew word here used for portion is “Shechem” (Shekhem), and this, as the proper names in the following chapter, has, and is meant to have, a double meaning. The Greek of the Septuagint could not preserve this play upon the words, and rendered it by the proper name Sikima, understanding that the portion referred to was that at Shechem. This the children of Israel understood too, for they gave this region to Ephraim (Joshua 16:0), and the parcel of ground became the resting-place for the bones of Joseph (Joshua 24:32–33).