‘And he had to pass through Samaria.'
The road through Samaria lies between Judea and Galilee, and although some Jews would take the long way round through Transjordan because they saw Samaria as an unclean land, and they wanted to avoid the danger of becoming ‘unclean' as a result of the failure of many in Samaria to follow rigid rules of ritual cleanliness, Jesus clearly did not see this as applying to Him.
‘He had to pass'. ‘Edei' - ‘it was necessary'. Was this the divine necessity? (Compare John 3:7; John 3:14; John 3:30; John 4:24; John 9:4; John 10:16; John 12:34; John 20:9). Or was it just the geographical necessity? While there was a recognised longer route to take it would have smacked of racial and religious prejudice. The truth is probably that we are again to take the double meaning. The Gospel is full of these nuances.
On His journey He passed through the land of the Samaritans. The Samaritans were a people despised by the Jews, and yet not looked on as Gentiles. It is doubtful if they were descended from the intermixture of the Israelites left in the land when Samaria was sacked in 722 BC, and the people brought in from other lands to replace those who had been deported, with whom they intermarried. They may, however, have been descended from YHWH worshippers who had remained in the land and had come together to form a community in order to preserve their own form of worship. Or they may have resulted from a group who arrived later seeking a home for themselves where they could follow their own religious beliefs. Certainly some of the people left in the land by the Assyrians had at least continued to look to the Temple at Jerusalem (Jeremiah 41:5), but after Judah's exile, when the Temple was being restored, the Samaritans had offered their help, and had been refused any part in it. They were looked on as being religiously unacceptable. And there is no doubt that their religion was not orthodox Judaism. The hellenisation of that part of the world by Alexander the Great had resulted in the disappearance of most people in the region into the mass of hellenists. The Samaritans stood out among them, being centred around Shechem and following a distorted form of Yahwism.
Certainly it seems that the later ‘Samaritans' were connected with the area around Shechem (Sir 50:26; 2Ma 5:22 on; John 6:2), and one of Josephus' sources describes them as ‘Shechemites'. After a long period of desolation Shechem had been rebuilt in the late 4th century BC, and at that stage they had built their own Temple, with a genuine Aaronic priesthood, on Mount Gerizim, which was later destroyed by John Hyrcanus (about 128 BC). They accepted the Law, but had their own version of it in the Samaritan Pentateuch, which named Mount Gerizim as the place of sacrifice. They believed in the one God, and the coming of a deliverer, ‘the Taheb (restorer)', identified by them with ‘the prophet' in Deuteronomy 18:15. They were therefore not looked on as pagans, but as second rate worshippers of the one God, and for that reason tolerated, but only in order to be dismissed as heretics.
Thus their connections with the earlier ‘Samaritans' may have been tenuous. They may have been a group who had kept themselves relatively clean from the introduction of the various gods of the nations, and maintained their own relatively pure system of worship, or they may have been a group that arrived later and settled there. They were, however, despised by men like the Judaisers, and indeed by most Jews.
Nothing therefore would have seemed less likely to most Jews than the spiritual transformation of a loose woman who, on top of that, was a despised Samaritan. Yet here at the beginning of Jesus' ministry He demonstrates that there are no barriers of race or past morals to prevent anyone from coming to God, once the heart is set in the right direction, and that God is ready to accept them.