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Joh_4:4
There maybe something in this. But it seems to us that a sufficient explanation may be found in the approach of winter, unfavorable to the open-air gatherings in town and country, to which He had hitherto ministered, and which would naturally induce Him to return to what had previously been his usual abode. And, in fact, we commonly find Him in the winter in Galilee, chiefly at Capernaum, where He had a fixed residence, probably a hired house.
There were three routes in use for this journey. One by crossing the Jordan near Jericho, and travelling northward through the eastern region (Perea), recrossing the river into Galilee a little below the lake of Tiberias. Another route was along the sea-coast, and through the plain of Esdraelon. The shortest and most direct road was by way of Shechem, through the country of the Samaritans, which was interposed between Judea and Galilee. Very rigid Jews, especially those of the sect of Pharisees, shunned this route from their abhorrence of the Samaritans; from the fear of pollution by intercourse with a people whom they accounted as even viler than the heathen; and in order to avoid the insults and inconveniences with which the Samaritans retaliated the contempt with which they were regarded. Jesus, however, made choice of this route. Being the nearest, He would not be likely to avoid it for any of the reasons stated; and opportunity could not fail to offer, as He passed, to sow the good seed among a people better prepared to receive Him, in many respects, than were the mass of the Jews themselves; because, while they, equally with the Jews, expected the speedy advent of the Messiah, their notions of his reign were less perverted by political ideas than among the Jews. But we shall not understand the nature of our Lord’s intercourse with the Samaritans in this journey, unless we pay some attention to their condition and opinions.
They derived their name from their being placed in the region of which Samaria had been the metropolis. Their own chief seat in that district was not, however, at Samaria, but at Shechem (in our Lord’s time called Sychar), in the beautiful valley between the mountains of Ebal and Gerizim. Originally they were foreigners from beyond the Euphrates, settled here by the kings of Assyria, after they had destroyed the kingdom of Israel and sent the ten tribes into captivity, in order to keep the country from utter desolation. They were of course idolaters; but finding that the beasts of prey increased rapidly in a country now so depopulated, they ascribed this to the wrath of the gods of the country for neglected rites; and they petitioned the imperial court to send them an Israelitish priest, who might teach them how to worship these gods, so as to avert their anger. Having obtained what they sought, they soon made up a curious religion of their own, combining the worship of their native idols with the worship of Jehovah. The idolatrous taint, however, became gradually diluted, and eventually disappeared; and the Samaritans became good Jews, professing, in those latter times in which our Lord appeared, a more primitive and better form of Judaism than generally prevailed among the Jews themselves. The reason of this was, that they retained the Judaism which they had been taught in a comparatively early age, and adhered with scrupulous exactness to the simple sense of the law of Moses; while among the Jews themselves the plain letter of the law had become encumbered, and indeed overwhelmed, by a dense heap of traditionary interpretations and applications, which were held to be of equal authority with the law itself, and which, in the time of our Savior, constituted, as He himself declares, a burden too heavy to be borne. From all this the Judaism of the Samaritans was free; they rejected, or rather ignored, these traditions; and the dislike and contempt of the Jews towards them was in no small degree enhanced by their want of, and disregard for, the learned rubbish which in their view constituted the perfection of the law. It was no doubt the slighting language with which our Lord spoke of these traditions, that gave point to the vituperation on one occasion used against Him: “Thou art a Samaritan, and hast a devil;” which was intended to be the severest, the most venomous, the most contemptuous thing that could possibly be said.
The root of the intense hatred between the two, lay in the contempt which the Jews, in the pride of their pure Abrahamic descent, showered upon the Samaritans as an inferior and ignoble people; and in the earnestness with which they withstood the attempt at amalgamation originally made by the Samaritans, and the earnest vehemence with which they refused to admit them to community of worship and religious privileges.
As the Samaritans became more Jewish, they became ashamed of that foreign and heathen origin which the Jews never forgot, nor ever failed to cast in their teeth; and in process of time they advanced a claim to be regarded as of Abrahamnic origin. This claim was derided by the Jews; but there was nevertheless some foundation for it. They had largely intermarried with the Jews. At first with the thin and scattered remnants of the ten tribes that remained in the land of Israel; then with the like remnant of the kingdom of Judah; and later with the captives who returned from Babylon. This, in process of time, threw a strong infusion of Jewish blood into the Samaritan body; and in the admixture, there is reason to suppose that the Jewish predominated over the foreign element. Such intermarriages had, however, long since ceased, and nothing could be more abhorrent either to Jew or Samaritan—for the latter, repelled at every point by the Jews, learned to repay their dislike in full measure; for it is not less true that hate engenders hate, than that love begets love.
Repelled with vehemence from any participation in the rebuilding of the temple after the captivity, and refused any equal right or interest in the services there celebrated, they at length concluded to have a sacerdotal establishment of their own. They erected a temple upon Mount Gerizim—the mountain from which the blessings of the law were delivered, when the Israelites first entered the Promised Land, and whereon Moses had set up an altar. From this they were led to deny that Jerusalem was the proper site of the temple, and that Mount Gerizim having thus been indicated by the great lawgiver himself, was the place where men ought to worship. This, as much as any other point of difference—if not more than any other—was a source of keen and bitter antagonism between them; and Jews, passing through the country at the great festivals, avowedly to worship at Jerusalem, were subject to so much annoyance and insult from the Samaritans, that such as could well do it journeyed by one of the more circuitous routes which have been indicated. At other times, travelling through Samaria, especially from Jerusalem, was not commonly subject to any other inconvenience than such as arose from the alienation and non-intercourse. For no Samaritan would receive a Jew, or a Jew receive a Samaritan into his house, or bid him God speed. They might buy of, or sell to, each other; but beyond the communication which such transactions involved, all intercourse was on both sides considered unbecoming and improper.
It was a strange condition of affairs that the territory of a people, thus disliking and disliked, should occupy the very heart of the country, and be interposed between the two great territorial sections of the Jewish population. The distance—greater in reality than in mere length of road—thus interposed between the Jews of the south and north, probably contributed in no faint degree to the sort of alienation which existed between them also. For the Jew of the south, or of Judea, despised the inhabitants of Galilee, only some degrees less than he despised the Samaritans.