JOHN190 - First Century Jews: Samaritan Woman Stay Away from Me

Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I have a scenario that I would like for you to envision with me, and it is disgusting. In this scenario, I want you to imagine that somebody in your household is sick and they have a sick room and it has the sick smell to it. And maybe it's a flu thing where somebody's going through entire boxes of Kleenexes.

There's a bunch of water cups by the side of the bed where the sick person is. So I was like, Yeah, can you bring me another water? Imagine you just went into that room while sick person's laying there and everything stinks and the Kleenexes are piled up, and you were like, you know, I'm thirsty. And you just started slurping down all that water from every single one of those cups.

And not just one clean drink, like you rotated the cup in your hand so that your mouth was on every possible surface of the rim of the cup. And then you put the inside of your elbow to your mouth and drag it all the way to the tips of your fingers. Alrighty, and you get on with your day. It's disgusting, right?

It's just water in cups. You can't even see the thing that makes it disgusting, which is the disease that is all over it, but you just know that what I said is skin crawlingly awful. Okay, if you can picture that, you can kind of picture the way people in the first century, Jews in the first century thought about the whole clean and unclean thing.

There's a lot of levels to this in the Old Testament. We've talked about clean and unclean a lot on this program over the years. Some of it has to do with stuff just being gross, some of it has to do with things that involve death or body fluids that tend to be disease magnets or good for transferring disease.

There's a whole bunch of rules deep in the Old Testament. All of them had a theological purpose to them. Many of them, though, when you go back and look at them with hindsight and the benefit of modern understanding of virology and all of that stuff, you look at it and you go, oh, okay, well, this is way ahead of its time.

And really, a lot of the clean and unclean stuff that you see, especially in Leviticus, those clean and unclean laws start to actually make sense. And you go, okay, when I look at that through the lenses of modern science, I'm like, I kind of see why the Jews did so well. If they obeyed all of that, they would have avoided a lot of the things that would have been disease vectors in the ancient world.

But still, there's other stuff on the list that you look at and you go, okay, there's stuff in the Old Testament that talks about the uncleanness of a nighttime emission on the part of presumably a younger man. It's the kind of thing that, you know, when I read through that as a young man, I was like, man, that's that's pretty tough.

Because if that happens to a dude, he's asleep. What are you supposed to do? Not sleep? Come on. But then the ladies read through it, and there's a bunch of stuff in there about how the menstrual cycle puts them in a position of not clean. And if you're a lady reading through the Old Testament, I would imagine that's the kind of thing that you've kind of perked up for and looked at and scratched your head about quite a bit.

How exactly does that work? Well, like I said, there are theological layers to the clean and unclean thing, there are practical layers to the clean and unclean thing, but basically, in order to participate in the life of the community, and especially in order to participate in the religious rhythms of the community, you had to be in a state of cleanness and not in a state of uncleanness.

Again, this is, you know, in the 20 teens at the height of Reddit atheism. These were the kind of passages that people would look at and be like, Well, you can't have shellfish. The Bible's that's ridiculous. But I would remind the 2015 Reddit atheist as I would remind myself, who's chuckled at a few of these rules, that we all as individuals have clean and unclean lists.

We all have a notion of ritual purity, we all have ideas about things that are just revolting and taboo. Every culture, every political tribe, everybody has clean and unclean standards. And typically they manifest with a religious level devotion, not just an incredibly sophisticated scientific clinical sense of duty to proper hygiene.

It's more than that. This clean and unclean thing is wired into who we are. Okay, that's all framed up. We've gone into it in way greater depth at other times, but there it is. Why does that matter for what we're doing right now with the gospel of John? Well, here we go. Let's get into it. John 4, let's just start from verse 4 here.

Now he, Jesus, had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, Will you give me a drink?

His disciples had gone into town to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, You are a Jew, and I'm a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews do not associate with Samaritans, inflection is mine. Now we're getting into the question of ritual purity. Jesus is tired and he asks for a drink.

Now, this is weird. I'm not trying to ask you to tap into like some latent disdain you have for some other people or group of people. I don't want us to think like that, but tap into some kind of resentment that you have felt at some point in your life, some sense of otherhood that you have felt about another individual or group of people.

Maybe there are people that think a certain thing or do a certain thing. You're like, I do not like their style. Now think about kind of the social divide between people on either side of whatever it issue it is that you're picturing. And just imagine the giganticness of somebody walking right into the middle of that and forgetting all of the social impossibilities and implications and outrages and everything else, and just going up to someone on the complete opposite side of the thing and being like, would you give me a drink?

I mean, that's wild. Because the person in such a scenario is putting themselves, at least to start, in a position of weakness. Would you serve me? You ever heard of the Ben Franklin effect? I think I can get this right. The idea is that Ben Franklin would ask rivals for favors, and he felt like it was a way to sort of diffuse the bomb and get past the normal social tension that would exist between people who thought what Franklin thought and people who thought what his rivals thought.

And most commonly he'd be like, excuse me, sir, could I borrow a book? He would ask to borrow something that was emblematic of the other person's knowledge and competence as a way to become in their debt. It's kind of odd, but also kind of genius. So in a way, I mean, Jesus is doing the could I borrow a book, ma'am, thing?

Will you give me a drink? And if that was all the layers that are here, that's very, very interesting. But there's another layer that the Samaritan woman immediately acknowledges that would preclude a Jew from asking for a drink from a Samaritan woman. The Samaritan woman said to him, You're a Jew and I'm a Samaritan woman.

How can you ask me for a drink? Now, smart people have come to this text over the years and they've read it a couple different ways. Some people come at it and they say, you know, she's just aware of the social implications. Like it's just weird. We don't hang out, we don't do that. So obviously we wouldn't drink beverages together.

What are you doing, weirdo? But other people look at it, and I think I am with the others on this one, and they say, no, this Samaritan woman was fully aware of what the clean and unclean ground rules were for the Jewish people when it came to Samaritans and specifically to Samaritan women. So in that first view, they would look at this and say, Oh yeah, she's just saying it's weird.

Like I can't give you, come on, dude, it's bizarre. Why are you asking me that? But in the second view, which is what I think, we're assuming that she's saying, No, I know the rules. You will be unclean if I do that. Is this a trick? Why are you asking me this question? And in this view, maybe she was even aware of some of the extra-biblical Jewish rules that were being written and memorized and repeated in the first century, including this one that is from around the same time recorded in the Mishnah Nidta 4 verse 1.

It says, The daughters of the Samaritans are menstruants from the cradle. I'm gonna do a little bit of translating. It's kind of gross. I'm just gonna go with it. The point being that this Jewish rule from the first century was that, like, hey, you know, Jewish women have their periodic time of the month, and there is biblical uncleanness associated with that in terms it's not sin, it's just ritually.

Those uh, you know, them's the rules, that's what it is. But Samaritan women, from the moment they're born, are unclean all the time. Period. Ah, Whitman, come on. Okay, not here's what I'm driving at. In the same way that if you went into somebody's sick room, you would just know intuitively that to slurp down water from all of their sick glasses by the bed is disgusting.

So it was common sense to this Samaritan woman that a Jew would think of it as even worse than that to be served water out of a vessel that a Samaritan woman had touched. Because one, she's a Samaritan, two, she's a woman, a figurative menstruant from birth, and three, her mouth has been all over that water vessel.

Jesus doesn't have anything to drink with, and she says so in his sir. The woman said, You have nothing to draw with. So he's gonna be drinking from her vessel. I read the situation as a woman who is both intrigued and confused. Is this a trap? Is this a trick? What are you trying to prove here? Am I on video?

Is this like a prank? TikTok? What is this? Obviously, I cannot draw you water and give you water, sir, because of all of your culture's ick. And also, probably uh she wasn't probably crazy about the idea. The Samaritans did not like the Jews back very much, and they had their own list of rules about clean and unclean.

In the first two moves that we've seen in this conversation, there are gigantic hurdles. One is the Samaritan hurdle. Now we're into the Samaritan woman hurdle and the extra biblical rules that the Jews of the first century had applied to them to declare them in a perpetual state of uncleanness. There's no way to even resolve the relationship with a Samaritan woman.

They're unclean, untouchable. You just can't even go anywhere near that. Or you, their uncleanness gets on you. They're sick, their ick gets on you. And yet, not only did Jesus ask for a drink of water, and not only has Jesus been advised of the rules by the outsider, the Samaritan woman, but he's still sitting there, and the conversation isn't gonna die with this objection that she raises.

Interesting. Yeah, we'll talk about that more next time around. In the meantime, I have a favor. As I told you, I screwed up two things in my book: The Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible, which otherwise I think is a really nice book. Also, they are fixing to reprint it, which is great. That means a lot of people bought it and more people want it.

So, yeah, and yeah, we're doing another printing of the thing. Cool, but that gives me a chance to fix my two screw-ups where I misspoke about the relationship between Jeroboam and Rhea Boam, and where I said that Colasse sat a hundred miles west of Ephesus, which would put it out in the middle of the Aegean Sea, like I don't even know my directions.

So embarrassing. But there's kind of a deadline here for us to fix things that I might have got wrong. Have you caught any other screw-ups, just any like typos or stupid stuff that I did? Like I'm totally it's a big book. I don't know. It's hard to get everything right on your first try. Yeah, I did my best.

But I'm not too proud to beg and I'm not too proud to admit that I screw things like this up from time to time. I would be very appreciative. If you caught anything else, if you could email me at thmbh at gmail.com and let me know. Because in just a couple days, I get to redo those small mistakes for the audiobook, for audible, and I also get to fix the print version and the ebook version.

And if there's anything else I've missed, I would really like to get it right. And you're the people I trust to ask and just be vulnerable with and say I I made mistakes in my book. Will you help me fix this? And are there any other little mistakes that you caught? Cool. Thank you for considering my request, and we'll keep talking Samaritan Woman stuff when we get back together next time around.

All right, um, Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.

JOHN190 - First Century Jews: Samaritan Woman Stay Away from Me

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