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Joh_4:10. Jesus certainly recognised at once the susceptibility of the woman; allowing, therefore, His own need to stand in abeyance, He began the conversation, which was sufficiently striking to excite at once the full interest of her sanguine temperament, though at the outset this interest was nothing but feminine curiosity.
τὴν δωρ . τ . θεοῦ ] the gift of God, which you may now partake of by conversation with me. Not certainly the person of Jesus Himself (the Greek Fathers, Erasmus, Beza, and most others, even Hengstenberg and Godet), to which he refers only as the discourse advances with the καί of closer definition.
σὺ ἂν ᾔτησας ] thou wouldest have prayed Him (i.e. to give you to drink), and He would have, etc. Observe the emphatic σύ (the request would have come from you).
ὕδωρ ζῶν ] The woman takes this to mean spring-water, îÇéÄí çÇéÌÄéí , Gen_26:19, Lev_14:5, Jer_2:13, as opposed to water in a cistern. Comp. vivi fontes and the like among the Romans; see Wetstein. Christ does indeed mean spring-water, but, as in Joh_7:38, in a spiritual sense (comp. Joh_4:14), namely, God’s grace and truth (Joh_1:14), which He, who is the possessor of them, communicates by His word out of His fulness, and which in its living, regenerating, and, for the satisfying of spiritual need, ever freshly efficacious power, is typified by water from the spring. Comp. analogous passages, Sir_15:3; Sir_24:21; Bar_3:12; Buxtorf, Lex. Talm. p. 2298. He does not mean Himself, His own life (Olshausen, Godet, following Epiphanius and most others), in the same manner as He speaks of Himself as the bread of life, Joh_6:35, for this is not indicated in any part of the present colloquy; nor does He mean faith (Joh_3:15), as Lücke thinks, nor the Spirit (Calovius, Baumgarten Crusius, Luthardt, Hofmann), the gift of which follows the communication of the living water. Any reference to baptism (Justin, Cyprian, Ambrose, and most others) is quite remote from the text. Calvin is substantially right when he sees typified totam renovationis gratiam.