Book of Common Prayer

By David.

11 The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. ² As they traveled east,^[a] they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they lived there. ³ They said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” They had brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. ⁴ They said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let’s make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.”

⁵ Yahweh came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. ⁶ Yahweh said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do. ⁷ Come, let’s go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” ⁸ So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city. ⁹ Therefore its name was called Babel, because there Yahweh confused the language of all the earth. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth.

¹³ For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he could swear by no one greater, he swore by himself, ¹⁴ saying, “Surely blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply you.”^{(A) 15} Thus, having patiently endured, he obtained the promise. ¹⁶ For men indeed swear by a greater one, and in every dispute of theirs the oath is final for confirmation. ¹⁷ In this way God, being determined to show more abundantly to the heirs of the promise the immutability of his counsel, interposed with an oath, ¹⁸ that by two immutable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we may have a strong encouragement, who have fled for refuge to take hold of the hope set before us. ¹⁹ This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and entering into that which is within the veil, ²⁰ where as a forerunner Jesus entered for us, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

4 Therefore when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John ² (although Jesus himself didn’t baptize, but his disciples), ³ he left Judea and departed into Galilee. ⁴ He needed to pass through Samaria. ⁵ So he came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. ⁶ Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being tired from his journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour.^[a]

⁷ A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸ For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.

⁹ The Samaritan woman therefore said to him, “How is it that you, being a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)

¹⁰ Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

¹¹ The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. So where do you get that living water? ¹² Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his children and his livestock?”

¹³ Jesus answered her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never thirst again; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”

¹⁵ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I don’t get thirsty, neither come all the way here to draw.”