Charles Ellicott Commentary John 4:21

"Jesus saith unto her, Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when neither in this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, shall ye worship the Father." — John 4:21 (ASV)

Woman (compare Note on John 2:4), believe me, the hour cometh.—Better, there comes an hour. The Authorised version of the latter clause gives the correct sense, if it is punctuated as follows: “When ye shall, neither in this mountain nor yet in Jerusalem, worship the Father;” “when ye shall worship, but without the limitation of holy places; when ye shall worship the Father of mankind, before whom Jew, and Samaritan, and Gentile are brothers.” Both these thoughts are suggested by her words.

She had referred in the past tense to the worship on Gerizim, when for more than a century and a half the temple had been in ruins, but she refers in the present to the temple at Jerusalem, where the form of worship was every day gone through. From that temple He had just come. The ruins of the one are before Him; the ruins of the other are present to His thoughts (John 2:18–22). Both centres of local worship are to cease. She had referred more than once to the claim which arose from direct descent from the patriarch (John 4:12–20). But the Father is God, and the hour coming, and then present (John 4:23), in Christ’s mission, had the Fatherhood of God and the sonship of humanity as its message to the world.

In this mountain.—Sychar was between Ebal and Gerizim, and she would point out the holy mountain with the ruins of the temple then in sight.

The contrast between “our fathers” and the emphatic “ye” carries back the thoughts to the rival temple and worship on Mount Gerizim from the time of Nehemiah. The enmity took its rise in the refusal to accept the help of the Samaritans in the restoration of the temple at Jerusalem (Ezra 4:2; compare 2 Kings 17:24 and following). The next step is recorded in Nehemiah 13:28.

Manasseh, the son of Joiada, the son of Eliashib the high priest, had married a daughter of Sanballat and was chased from Jerusalem. Sanballat consequently supported his son-in-law in establishing a rival worship, but it is not clear that the temple was built until a century later, in the time of Alexander the Great.

The authority for the details of the history is Josephus (Ant. xi. 8, § 2), but he seems to confuse Sanballat the Persian satrap with Sanballat the Horonite. In any case, from the erection of the temple on Mount Gerizim, the schism was complete.

The temple was destroyed by John Hyrcanus about 129 B.C. (Ant. xiii. 9, § 1), but the mountain on which it stood continued to be, and is to this day, the holy place of the Samaritans. All travelers in the Holy Land describe their Passover, still eaten on this mountain in accordance with the ritual of the Pentateuch.

They claimed that this mountain, and not Jerusalem, was the true scene of the sacrifice of Isaac, and Gentile tradition marked it out as the meeting-place with Melchizedek (Euseb. Prœp. Evang. ix. 22). In accordance with their claim, they had changed in every instance the reading of the Pentateuch, “God will choose a spot” (Deuteronomy 12:14; Deuteronomy 18:6, etc.), into “He has chosen,” i.e., Gerizim.

“Ebal,” in Deuteronomy 27:5, had become “Gerizim,” and the Ten Commandments in Exodus and Deuteronomy are followed by an interpolated command to erect an altar in Mount Gerizim. Jerusalem, on the other hand, had never once been named in the Pentateuch, which was the only part of the Jewish canon they accepted. It was but a modern city in comparison with the claim that Gerizim was a holy place from the time of Abraham onward.