³ he left Judea and started back to Galilee. ⁴ But he had to go through Samaria. ⁵ So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.^{(A) 6} Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

⁷ A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸ (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) ⁹ The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)^{[a](B) 10} Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”^{(C) 11} The woman said to him, “Sir,^[b] you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹² Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” ¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”^{(D) 15} The woman said to him, “Sir,^[c] give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”^(E)

Rivers of Living Water

³⁷ On the last day of the festival, the great day, while Jesus was standing there, he cried out, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me,^{(A) 38} and let the one who believes in me drink. As^[a] the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart^[b] shall flow rivers of living water.’ ”^{(B) 39} Now he said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive, for as yet there was no Spirit^[c] because Jesus was not yet glorified.^(C)