John 4:6–17 has traditionally been read as a story about evangelism. Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman, reveals himself as the giver of living water, exposes her complicated marital history, and eventually becomes known among the Samaritans. In many Christian interpretations, the woman is remembered primarily as a sinner who encounters Jesus and receives salvation. In others, she becomes an exemplary missionary who leaves the well and tells her community about Jesus.
This essay offers a different reading.
I argue that John 4 participates in the ancient biblical tradition of the man meeting his wife at the well encounter, a literary pattern in which a man encounters a woman at a well and the encounter leads toward marriage or romantic union. The Gospel of John deliberately places Jesus at Jacob's well, in Samaria, where he encounters a woman and begins a conversation about water, thirst, and intimacy. The setting therefore carries more literary weight than a simple missionary encounter.
My argument goes further. Jesus is sexually interested in the Samaritan woman. Jesus wants her. The language of thirst, drinking, living water, the deep well, and the subsequent question about her husband creates an erotic dimension within the conversation. The encounter is not merely spiritual. It is an encounter between a sexually embodied man and a sexually embodied woman.
The most provocative part of this reading concerns the phrase “living water.” Conventional Christian interpretation generally understands the living water as eternal life, salvation, or the spiritual life that Jesus gives. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, for example, interprets the water imagery spiritually, contrasting ordinary water that provides temporary satisfaction with the living water Christ gives eternally. That reading is important, but it does not exhaust the imagery.
I argue that the living water can also be read through Jesus' own embodied sexuality and desire. Jesus is thirsty, yet he presents himself as the living water. He asks the woman to satisfy his thirst while simultaneously offering himself as the one who can satisfy hers. Jesus is therefore both the thirsty man and the living water.
I am not claiming that John simply states, “Jesus was sexually attracted to this woman.” Rather, I am arguing that the literary construction of the scene makes such a reading possible and, in my view, compelling.
The result is a Jesus who is not removed from human sexuality. He is a Jewish man with a human body, physical thirst, desire, and relational presence. Reading him this way challenges the tendency to make Jesus less human whenever human sexuality enters the conversation.
I. The Woman at the Well We Think We Know
The text introduces a very physical Jesus. Jesus has been traveling from Judea toward Galilee and passes through Samaria. John says that Jesus is tired from his journey and sits beside Jacob's well. When the Samaritan woman arrives to draw water, Jesus says to her, “Give me a drink.” The woman immediately recognizes the social problem: Jesus is a Jew and she is a Samaritan woman. John explicitly identifies the Jewish-Samaritan boundary as significant.
Jesus then tells her that if she knew who was speaking to her, she would have asked him, and he would have given her “living water.” She asks how he could possibly provide this water when he has no bucket and the well is deep. Jesus continues speaking about water that eliminates thirst and becomes a spring within the person who receives it.
Then the conversation changes.
Jesus says, “Go, call your husband, and come back.”
The woman responds that she has no husband. Jesus tells her that she has had five husbands and that the man she currently has is not her husband.²
These are the basic textual movements: Jesus is tired. Jesus is thirsty. Jesus asks a woman for water. Jesus introduces living water. The woman asks about the deep well. Jesus asks about her husband.
These details should not be separated from one another.
The story begins with physical thirst and ends its first dialogue with the subject of the woman's intimate relationships. Between those two moments stands the highly suggestive language of drinking, water, thirst, and the deep well.
The conventional interpretation often moves immediately from physical water to spiritual water. My reading refuses to make that movement too quickly. John can be doing more than one thing at the same time.
The conversation can be spiritual and physical.
It can be theological and erotic.
It can be about eternal life and about human desire.
The woman at the well should therefore not be reduced to a sinner receiving a religious lesson. She is a woman engaged in a conversation with a sexually embodied man who has initiated contact with her.
Jesus does not begin by preaching.
He begins by asking her for something.
“Give me a drink.”
That matters.
II. Why Is Jesus at Jacob's Well?
John deliberately identifies the location as Jacob's well. This detail connects the story to Israel's ancestral history. The well is not merely a convenient water source. It is Jacob's well, and Jacob is one of the central patriarchs of Israel.
The Gospel therefore places Jesus within a location already loaded with biblical memory.
Jean-Louis Ska observes that the scene resembles several Old Testament narratives involving men who travel through foreign territory, arrive at a well, encounter women, and become involved in relationships that lead toward marriage. These include Abraham's servant and Rebekah in Genesis 24, Jacob and Rachel in Genesis 29, and Moses and Zipporah in Exodus 2.
Andrew Hagan similarly argues that the encounter with the Samaritan woman recalls the traditional Jewish well scene. Andrew Arterbury, however, emphasizes hospitality as an important alternative explanation for the encounter.
The hospitality interpretation is valuable, but it should not erase the bride at the well tradition.
The literary pattern is too striking to ignore.
A man travels.
He enters foreign territory.
He becomes tired.
He arrives at a well.
A woman appears.
Conversation begins.
Water becomes central.
The man and woman become relationally connected.
That is the basic shape of several biblical courtship stories.
John places Jesus inside this pattern and then changes the ending.
Jesus is therefore not simply passing through Samaria as a missionary.
He is entering a biblical courtship landscape.
The fact that the encounter does not end in marriage does not mean the courtship pattern disappears. Instead, John may be invoking the expectation precisely in order to disrupt it.
The reader recognizes the pattern and waits for the familiar ending.
But John gives us something stranger.
Jesus meets the woman.
Jesus wants something from her.
Jesus asks her about her intimate life.
And then the expected marriage never occurs.
That interruption is precisely what makes the sexual dimension of the scene significant.
III. Jesus Asks Her for a Drink
The first words Jesus speaks directly to the woman are
“Give me a drink.”
Jesus is physically tired and thirsty. The woman has the water. Jesus does not.
This reverses the expectations of many Christian readings of the passage. We are accustomed to imagining Jesus as the person who possesses everything the woman needs. Yet the story begins with Jesus being the one who needs something from her.
The reversal is important.
In the traditional biblical well narratives, the woman often provides water or hospitality to the male stranger. Rebekah gives Abraham's servant water. Rachel encounters Jacob at the well. Zipporah and her sisters encounter Moses at a well.
The Samaritan woman, however, does not simply respond as the women in those stories do.
She questions Jesus.
She does not rush to give him water.
She asks why a Jewish man would ask a Samaritan woman for a drink.
Her response introduces resistance into the encounter.
The woman is not passive.
This makes the encounter more interesting.
If Jesus is the one initiating the interaction, and if Jesus is the one asking for something, then the power dynamics are not what traditional interpretations often assume.
Jesus is thirsty.
He needs something from her.
The woman has something he wants.
That is already a significant reversal.
IV. The Biblical Courtship Pattern
The biblical evidence for well-wedding and betrothal narratives is substantial enough to establish an important literary pattern.
Isaac's future wife Rebekah is encountered at a well in Genesis 24. Jacob meets Rachel at a well in Genesis 29. Moses encounters Zipporah at a well in Exodus 2.
Maccini identifies parallels between John 4 and Genesis 24, particularly the encounter between Abraham's servant and Rebekah. Hagan and Ska likewise identify the well as a recurring setting for encounters involving future wives. Callahan describes the well as a location where several major biblical men found their mates.
The Samaritan woman does not have to be literally presented as Jesus' future wife for John to invoke this literary pattern.
The literary allusion can function without the conventional ending.
Jesus is at Jacob's well.
A woman comes to him.
Water is requested.
Conversation begins.
The woman's marital status becomes part of the dialogue.
These elements activate the memory of earlier biblical encounters.
But John changes the story.
Jesus does not take the woman home.
The woman does not meet Jesus' family.
There is no marriage.
Instead, the encounter becomes a theological revelation.
The absence of marriage does not cancel the sexual dimension.
It may actually intensify it.
The biblical courtship pattern establishes a framework of male-female attraction and relationship. John then takes that framework and transforms it.
Jesus can be looking for a bride while the bride is no longer simply one woman.
Theologically, the church becomes the bride of Christ.
But the spiritual meaning does not require us to erase the earthly and bodily imagery that produces it.
The story can be and also.
Jesus is the theological bridegroom.
Jesus is also a sexually embodied man.
V. “Give Me a Drink” and the Language of Desire
The language of the conversation is unusually concentrated around thirst and water.
Jesus asks for a drink.
He speaks about living water.
The woman asks where he will get this water.
She points out that the well is deep.
Jesus says that ordinary water produces thirst again while the water he gives becomes a spring.
The woman asks for this water.
Immediately afterward Jesus asks her to call her husband.
Allen Dwight Callahan argues that the encounter contains sexual undertones recognizable to readers familiar with the Hebrew Bible. Colleen Conway discusses the betrothal structure and cites Lyle Eslinger's argument that the language of drinking and the deep well creates sexual innuendo and encourages the reader to anticipate a union between Jesus and the woman.
These observations provide an important foundation for my reading.
I am not treating individual words as secret sexual codes. The argument rests on the accumulation of imagery.
Thirst.
Drinking.
Water.
Living water.
Deep well.
Man.
Woman.
Husband.
These elements create a field of meaning in which sexual desire can be heard alongside theological meaning.
This is where my reading of living water becomes central.
Jesus does not merely possess living water.
He says that he will give it.
The woman wants it.
Jesus is the source of it.
If the living water signifies Jesus himself, then the metaphor cannot be detached completely from Jesus' embodied personhood.
The living water is Jesus.
And Jesus is not an abstract spirit.
He is a man sitting beside a well.
He is tired.
He is thirsty.
He is talking to a woman.
Therefore, when I read the living water through sexuality, I am not claiming that the metaphor ceases to mean eternal life. I am arguing that the metaphor can simultaneously reveal something about Jesus' embodied desire.
Jesus is the one who gives the water.
Jesus is also the one who thirsts.
Jesus is thirsty, and Jesus is the living water.
VI. Jesus Wants Her
Jesus initiates the encounter.
He speaks directly to the woman.
He asks her for water.
He continues the conversation despite the Jewish-Samaritan boundary.
He discusses her marital history.
He remains engaged with her rather than ending the encounter after discovering her complicated relationship history.
The woman is not presented as sexually invisible.
Nor does Jesus treat her sexual history as a reason to dismiss her.
The text says she has had five husbands and that the man she currently has is not her husband. The text does not, however, explicitly call her a prostitute.
This distinction is important.
Having five husbands does not automatically establish prostitution, promiscuity, or moral depravity. Her circumstances may have involved divorce, widowhood, social vulnerability, or other realities that the Gospel does not explain.
The traditional label of “whore” therefore says more than the text itself says.
What matters for this reading is that Jesus knows her relational history and continues to engage her.
He does not retreat from her.
He does not reject her.
He does not treat her as sexually contaminated.
Instead, Jesus wants to continue the encounter.
I read this as desire.
Jesus wants her.
He is sexually interested in her.
His interest does not disappear because she is Samaritan, because she is a woman, or because her marital history is complicated.
This is precisely what makes the reading liberative.
VII. “Call Your Husband”
Jesus says:
“Go, call your husband, and come back.”
The woman answers that she has no husband.
Jesus responds by telling her that she has had five husbands and that the man she currently has is not her husband.
Callahan argues that Jesus' command to get her husband can be understood as a conversational equivalent of asking, “Are you married?”
This interpretation is particularly important for my argument.
Jesus could have immediately launched into a theological lecture.
Instead, he asks about her intimate relationship status.
The question appears at exactly the point where the conversation has already revolved around thirst, water, giving, receiving, and desire.
This does not prove a sexual proposition in isolation.
But it contributes to the cumulative structure of the encounter.
Within my reading, “Call your husband” functions as a question about availability.
Jesus is asking about the woman's relationship status.
The answer is complicated.
She has had five husbands.
The man she currently has is not her husband.
The implication is that the woman is not conventionally attached to the man she is currently with.
The text therefore creates an opening in the relational situation.
And this is where my reading becomes particularly provocative: when Jesus says that the man she has is not her husband, I read the possibility that Jesus is positioning himself within the conversation as the present male figure.
John never explicitly says this.
But within the courtship framework, it becomes a meaningful possibility.
VIII. They Were Flirting
The woman repeatedly responds to Jesus rather than simply accepting what he says.
She questions him.
She challenges his ability to provide water.
She asks whether he is greater than Jacob.
Jesus continues the conversation.
The dialogue contains misunderstanding, double meaning, and symbolic language, all characteristic features of John's literary style.
Adele Reinhartz emphasizes John's use of symbolism, irony, contrast, repetition, and misunderstanding.
Flirtation frequently depends upon ambiguity.
People can speak about one thing while meaning something more.
The Samaritan woman appears to understand Jesus' words on one level and challenge them on another.
When Jesus speaks of living water, she responds practically:
“You have no bucket, and the well is deep.”
This can be read as resistance.
She is not simply swept away by Jesus' words.
She challenges him.
She makes him explain himself.
The result is a conversational tension that can be read as flirtatious.
They were flirting.
Jesus is making advances, and the woman does not simply surrender to them.
She pushes back.
Her resistance actually strengthens the erotic reading because flirtation is not necessarily one person making a declaration and the other immediately accepting it. Flirtation can be playful, indirect, resistant, and ambiguous.
The woman is not an object being acted upon.
She is a participant.
She talks back.
She questions Jesus.
She refuses to behave like the passive woman of a conventional patriarchal narrative.
IX. The Woman Who Would Not Behave
The Samaritan woman repeatedly speaks.
She questions Jesus about Jewish and Samaritan relations.
She challenges his ability to provide water.
She invokes Jacob.
She asks for the living water.
She discusses her husband.
She eventually speaks to the people of her city about Jesus.
The woman therefore has agency.
This is important for a feminist reading.
She is not simply a sinful woman waiting for a male religious authority to explain God to her. She participates in the theological conversation.
She also does not follow the expected behavior of the women in the earlier well narratives.
She does not simply give Jesus water and run to her father.
She remains in conversation.
She challenges him.
She interprets him.
She becomes a witness.
Her agency changes the sexual reading.
If Jesus desires her, she is not simply the passive recipient of male desire.
She has a voice.
She resists.
She decides how to respond.
She ultimately leaves the encounter with her own interpretation of what has happened.
The encounter therefore becomes liberative not because Jesus “rescues” a helpless woman, but because the woman is treated as a person capable of speaking, questioning, resisting, interpreting, and proclaiming.
X. Jesus Was Thirsty for Her
John begins the encounter by telling us that Jesus is tired from his journey.
Jesus asks the woman for a drink.
The conversation then turns to living water.
The woman asks about the deep well.
Jesus speaks about thirst.
Jesus then asks about her husband.
The physical and symbolic levels of the scene overlap.
Jesus' physical thirst introduces the encounter.
His language about living water transforms the meaning of thirst.
The discussion of the woman's marital status introduces the possibility of human relational desire.
Rather than separating these dimensions, my reading holds them together.
Jesus was thirsty for her.
This is the heart of my reading.
Jesus' thirst is not merely a biological detail that gets quickly discarded when the spiritual meaning of water appears. His physical thirst is part of how John introduces him.
Jesus is embodied.
He experiences bodily need.
He asks a woman to meet that need.
Then he offers himself as living water.
The paradox is powerful:
The thirsty Jesus is the living water.
His desire and his gift are therefore intertwined.
He wants something from her, and he offers something of himself.
This is why sexuality matters.
A theology that insists that Jesus cannot experience sexual desire risks turning his humanity into a symbol.
XI. Desire, Masculinity, and a Different Kind of Normalcy
Jesus is a Jewish man living within a culture where marriage, family, gender, ethnicity, and religious identity were deeply interconnected.
The Gospel repeatedly places Jesus in situations where he crosses social boundaries.
In John 4, he crosses a Jewish-Samaritan boundary and a gender boundary by engaging a Samaritan woman publicly.
Colleen Conway's commentary on Jesus and Greco-Roman masculinity provides a useful framework for thinking about Jesus as a male body rather than as a disembodied theological figure.
My argument can therefore be pushed further.
If Jesus is fully human, then his humanity includes bodily existence.
If his body is real, then sexuality cannot automatically be excluded from his humanity.
This does not mean that every encounter Jesus has with a woman is sexual.
It means that Christian interpretation should not begin with the assumption that Jesus' sexuality is impossible or irrelevant.
The Samaritan woman allows John to present a Jesus who crosses several forms of normalcy simultaneously.
He enters foreign territory.
He speaks publicly with a woman.
He asks her for water.
He engages her relational history.
He speaks in sexually suggestive language.
He is interested in her.
This is a different kind of normalcy.
Jesus is not less holy because he is sexually embodied.
Instead, his sexuality becomes part of the larger deconstruction of boundaries that characterizes the encounter.
XII. The Foreign Woman
The woman is a Samaritan.
John explicitly identifies the tension between Jews and Samaritans. Gail O'Day emphasizes the hostility between the two communities and the importance of their competing claims regarding worship. David Rensberger likewise discusses the complicated history of Samaritan identity and argues that Samaria was not simply a geographically marginalized Jewish territory.
The encounter therefore crosses an ethnic and religious boundary.
The sexual reading becomes more powerful when placed beside the ethnic reading.
Jesus is not merely attracted to a woman.
He is attracted to a Samaritan woman.
The traditional biblical well narratives already contain encounters between Israelite men and women from outside their immediate communities.
Jesus follows that pattern while radically altering it.
Jesus' interest in this woman challenges assumptions about who is worthy of intimacy.
She is foreign.
She is female.
Her marital history is complicated.
She is not presented as an idealized virgin bride.
And yet Jesus wants her.
That is liberative.
It means that the woman does not have to become culturally acceptable before she can be seen.
Jesus sees her first.
XIII. Deconstructing the Boundaries
The encounter at Jacob's well destabilizes multiple binaries:
- Jew / Samaritan
- male / female
- sacred / sexual
- physical / spiritual
- giver / receiver
- sinner / disciple
- desire / holiness
- human / divine
Jesus is divine, yet he is tired and thirsty.
He is Jewish, yet he speaks intimately with a Samaritan.
He is male, yet he asks a woman for something.
He is the giver of living water, yet he begins by needing water himself.
The woman is socially complicated, yet she becomes a theological interlocutor and witness.
John's Gospel is famous for using misunderstanding and double meaning. Reinhartz identifies symbolism, irony, contrast, repetition, and misunderstanding as important literary devices in the Gospel.
The water dialogue exemplifies this technique.
Jesus means one thing.
The woman initially hears another.
The reader is invited to move between meanings.
My reading extends that literary movement into sexuality.
The water can be spiritual.
The water can also be erotic.
Jesus can be speaking about eternal life.
Jesus can also be speaking through the language of desire.
The question is not whether the scene is really spiritual or really sexual.
The better question is what happens if it is both.
The theological meaning does not cancel the bodily meaning.
The bodily meaning does not cancel the theological meaning.
It is, and also both.
XIV. The Living Water Is Jesus
This is the center of the argument
Jesus says that if the woman knew who was speaking to her, she would ask him, and he would give her living water.
He describes this water as something that becomes a spring within the person who receives it and leads to eternal life.
The woman asks for the water.
Traditional Christian theology rightly sees the living water as a symbol of life given by Christ.
But if the water is something that Jesus gives because it comes from him, the metaphor also directs attention toward Jesus himself.
The water is not an independent object.
Jesus is the source.
Therefore the metaphor can be read christologically and bodily.
The living water is Jesus.
If Jesus is the living water, then the metaphor carries the presence of the man who is speaking.
And that man is thirsty.
This creates the central paradox of the scene:
Jesus thirsts for water while offering living water.
Within my reading, this paradox becomes an image of desire itself.
Jesus desires the woman.
Jesus offers himself.
The woman desires the water.
The woman encounters Jesus.
The physical and spiritual dimensions of desire become intertwined.
The living water is therefore not merely something Jesus gives to the woman.
The living water is Jesus, his presence, his body, his desire, his life.
XV. Liberation for Women and Foreigners
The Samaritan woman becomes an important participant in the spread of Jesus' message among her community. The Samaritans respond positively to the encounter.
Rensberger argues that the Samaritan episode presents Samaritans as more open to Jesus than the Jews and emphasizes that the conflict between Jewish and Samaritan worship is ultimately displaced by worship in spirit and truth.
The woman's sexual and ethnic identity should therefore not be treated as obstacles that Jesus must overcome before she can become useful.
They are part of the encounter itself.
Jesus does not require her to become someone else before speaking with her.
If Jesus is sexually interested in this woman, then the encounter becomes even more disruptive.
The Messiah desires a foreign woman.
He does not require her to be a pure Jewish virgin.
He does not require her to have an uncomplicated marital history.
He does not require her to conform to the sexual expectations of respectable religious society.
He engages her as a woman.
He engages her as a Samaritan.
He engages her as a sexual person.
And he continues speaking with her.
That is why this reading can be liberative.
The woman's body does not disqualify her from theological significance.
Her sexuality does not make her invisible.
Her ethnicity does not make her untouchable.
Her history does not make her unworthy of desire.
XVI. Theological Implications
A reading in which Jesus is sexually interested in the Samaritan woman will disturb conventional Christian assumptions.
That disturbance is precisely why the reading matters.
Christian theology has often been comfortable describing Jesus as hungry, tired, thirsty, angry, compassionate, sorrowful, and physically vulnerable. Yet sexuality is frequently removed from his humanity.
The Samaritan woman challenges that removal.
If Jesus is a fully embodied human being, then sexuality belongs within the discussion of his humanity.
This does not require claiming that Jesus had sexual relationships or that he married the Samaritan woman. The Gospel does not say that.
It does, however, allow us to read the encounter as one in which Jesus' desire is present.
The text gives us a man who is thirsty.
It gives us a woman who comes to the well.
It gives us the language of drinking and living water.
It gives us the deep well.
It gives us the question about the husband.
It gives us a woman who resists and responds.
And it gives us a Jesus who remains engaged.
The sexual dimension should not be erased simply because the encounter ultimately becomes theological.
Conclusion: Jesus Was Thirsty for Her
The Samaritan woman at the well is more complicated than the traditional “sinful woman” interpretation allows.
She is not merely a sinner.
She is not merely a missionary.
She is not merely a symbol of Samaria.
She is a woman who encounters Jesus in a setting already shaped by biblical stories of men meeting women at wells.
Jesus is tired.
Jesus is thirsty.
Jesus asks her for a drink.
Then he begins speaking about living water.
The woman challenges him.
Jesus continues.
He asks about her husband.
She answers.
The conversation becomes increasingly intimate.
My reading argues that this intimacy is sexual as well as theological.
Jesus wants her.
Jesus is sexually interested in her.
The erotic language of thirst, drinking, water, and the deep well is not an accidental feature of the scene. It participates in the larger literary pattern of the well-and-betrothal narratives. John takes that pattern and refuses to give the reader its expected ending.
There is no wedding.
There is no conventional bride.
Instead, there is revelation.
But the absence of marriage does not mean the absence of desire.
Jesus can desire the woman without marrying her.
Jesus can be sexually interested in her without the story becoming a romance narrative in the conventional sense.
And the living water can signify eternal life without losing its connection to the embodied Jesus who speaks about it.
This is the heart of the argument:
Jesus is the living water.
Jesus is the thirsty man.
Jesus wants her.
And if the living water is Jesus himself, then the water flowing from this encounter is not the water of a disembodied Christ. It is the water of an embodied Christ, one who can thirst, desire, cross boundaries, encounter a woman, and reveal God without ceasing to be human.
The Samaritan woman therefore does not merely meet a missionary at a well.
She meets a man.
A thirsty man.
A desiring man.
A man who wants her.
And the living water he offers is himself.
References
Arterbury, Andrew E. “Breaking the Betrothal Bonds: Hospitality in John 4.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (2010): 63–83.
Bridges, Linda McKinnish. “John 4:5–42.” Interpretation 48, no. 2 (April 1994): 173–176.
Callahan, Allen Dwight. “The Gospel of John.” In True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, edited by Brian K. Blount, Cain Hope Felder, Clarice J. Martin, and Emerson B. Powery. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2007.
Conway, Colleen M. Behold the Man: Jesus and Greco-Roman Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Keener, Craig S. “Some New Testament Invitations to Ethnic Reconciliation.” The Evangelical Quarterly 75, no. 3 (July 2003): 195–213.
Kierspel, Lars. “‘Dematerializing’ Religion: Reading John 2–4 as a Chiasm.” Biblica 89, no. 4 (2008): 526–554.
Maccini, Robert Gordon. “A Reassessment of the Woman at the Well in John 4 in Light of the Samaritan Context.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 53 (March 1994): 35–46.
O'Day, Gail R. “Narrative Mode and Theological Claim: A Study in the Fourth Gospel.” Journal of Biblical Literature 105, no. 4 (December 1986): 657–668.
Reinhartz, Adele. “John.” In Fortress Commentary on the Bible: New Testament. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Rensberger, David. “Oppression and Identity in the Gospel of John.”
Schottroff, Luise. “The Samaritan Woman and the Notion of Sexuality in the Fourth Gospel.”
Ska, Jean-Louis, S.J. “Jesus and the Samaritan Woman: Using the Old Testament.” Landas: Journal of Loyola School of Theology.
Vanhoozer, Kevin J. “Worship at the Well: From Dogmatics to Doxology and Back Again.” Trinity Journal 23, no. 1 (2002): 3–16.
A Note on the Argument
John does not explicitly say, “Jesus was sexually attracted to the Samaritan woman.” The claim of my essay is instead that the textual details, the well setting, the biblical betrothal pattern, Jesus' physical thirst, his request for water, the language of drinking and living water, the deep well, and the movement into the woman's marital status give evidence that supports reading Jesus as sexually interested in her.
My argument is therefore not that the spiritual interpretation is wrong.
It is that the spiritual interpretation is not the only possible meaning of the scene.
The living water can be theological.
The encounter can be spiritual.
And Jesus can still be thirsty.
It is, and also both.