Where is Jacob's well?

Question

Accepted Answer

At the eastern edge of Nablus in the West Bank, where the pass between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal opens on to the plain: the well lies at the foot of Gerizim, a few hundred metres from the mound of ancient Shechem, Tell Balata, and about a kilometre south of the village of Askar, where the map places Sychar. Jerusalem is 49 km to the south and Nazareth 54 km to the north, so the well stands about halfway on the road from Judaea to Galilee through Samaria. It is one of the few holy places of the Gospels whose identification almost no one disputes, kept today in the crypt of the Greek Orthodox church of St Photini, the name tradition gives the Samaritan woman. John sets the scene: Jesus “cometh he to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob's well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus on the well: and it was about the sixth hour.” The woman objects, “thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep”, and asks, “Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us the well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?” Pointing to Gerizim she says, “Our fathers worshipped in this mountain”. Genesis knows the field but not the well: Jacob “bought a parcel of a field, where he had spread his tent, at the hand of the children of Hamor, Shechem's father, for an hundred pieces of money”, and in it Joseph's bones were buried, as Joshua records. The well is cut through rock and is deep: Henry Maundrell in 1697 gave thirty-five yards, 105 feet or about 32 m, and the Survey of Western Palestine (1882) found 75 feet, about 23 m, after centuries of rubbish; it has since been cleared. A church stood over it by the 380s, when Jerome's Paula visited; the pilgrim Arculf about 680 saw a cruciform church with the well at its centre; the Crusaders rebuilt it, and after its ruin the Greek Orthodox bought the site about 1860 and finished the present church in 2007. Joseph's traditional tomb lies a few hundred metres to the north. On Gerizim above, the Samaritans' temple stood, by its excavator's dating, from the fifth century BC until John Hyrcanus destroyed it, and they still keep Passover on the mountain.