The well is deep

I have once again been immersing myself in the Fourth Gospel. Reading through the account of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well (John 4), I was overcome by a sense of frustration. The narrative as it has come down to us is so choppy and disconnected that it seems very obviously to have suffered much in transmission -- additions, deletions, general garbling -- to the point that what we have now must be quite different from whatever was first laid down by the pen of the Beloved Disciple -- if it was laid down by his pen, and if he ever even existed. How to extract from the text truths now nearly effaced by centuries of textual wear and tear? How even to be sure that there are any such truths to extract?

I seemed to hear the voice of the Samaritan woman, addressing to me words first addressed to someone quite different: "Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep." Down, down, twenty centuries down lies the living water, and we have nothing to draw with. Who do we think we're fooling with our Bible-reading pretensions?

The line "The well is deep" kept running through my mind, and soon I realized why: because of its similarity to a line from Nietzsche which I had recently translated: Die Welt ist tief -- "The world is deep," with the German for "world" resembling the English well. "Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht," adds Nietzsche -- "and deeper than the day had thought." Even the brightest light of day illumines only the surfaces of things, and the truth behind the phaneron in which we live is no more readily divinable than that behind the Bible. We have nothing to draw with, and the world is deep.

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Jesus' solution to the problem of the deep well is to bypass it entirely, in favor of an internal source of water: "whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." And the woman replies, "Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw."

And then they drop the subject. They talk a bit about the woman's marital history, Jewish and Samaritan holy sites, and the Messiah, but no further mention is made of the living water -- leaving the reader to wonder what it is, how to get it, and whether or not Jesus ever ended up giving it to the woman. (The Fourth Gospel is full of such loose ends. How does Jesus' encounter with Nicodemus end, for example? We don't know; the story just suddenly stops.)

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One who has drunk the living water (or drunk of it, rather; no need to drink it all) has thenceforth a well inside himself, making external sources of water unnecessary -- but that initial draught of living water comes not from within but from without: Jesus offers it, and it must be drunk.

Is this another version of the parable of the sower -- where once the seed has been sown, and in good ground, it can bring forth fruit of its own, obviating the need for further sowing?

The sower soweth the word. Is the living water to be similarly interpreted? And what then is the "word"? Some particular message communicated by Christ? Christ himself? The divine logos, or the thoughts of God? And how is one to drink of it?