My friend and colleague Charles Allen shared the following as part of an e-mail:<\/p>\n
John\u2019s Gospel doesn\u2019t really say that much about her, but that hasn\u2019t stopped preachers and listeners from letting their imaginations run wild. After all, she\u2019s had five husbands, and now she\u2019s living with a man out of wedlock. So it\u2019s been easy to jump to the conclusion that she\u2019s been doing a lot of bed hopping.But the Gospel doesn\u2019t tell us that. We do know that she lived in a day when women were men\u2019s property\u2014if she didn\u2019t belong to her father, she had to belong to a husband, and nobody would have thought to ask her what she wanted. You can be pretty sure that she didn\u2019t get to pick any of her five husbands. We don\u2019t know how she lost them either, but we know that it wasn\u2019t her choice. And if the man she was living with now didn\u2019t want to take responsibility for her and marry her, there wasn\u2019t much she could do about it. So don\u2019t assume that she\u2019s guilty of loose living.On the other hand, she\u2019s still a woman with lots of strikes against her. The events in her life don\u2019t look good on a resume, and she wouldn\u2019t want to share them with a total stranger.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I thought I should share it, since very often the woman is viewed through a different cultural lens, and the character of her life misunderstood as a result. This happens quite often with other texts too. How frequently people think Bathsheba had a choice whether to go with King David's men (some even twist the text to depict her as bathing on her rooftop to entice him!), and that Hagar had a choice whether to be Sarah's slave and then Abraham's wife. If we fail to study how ancient cultures that were the environments of the Biblical authors functioned, there is so very much that we will inevitably misunderstand.<\/p>\n
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My friend and colleague Charles Allen shared the following as part of an e-mail: John\u2019s Gospel doesn\u2019t really say that much about her, but that hasn\u2019t stopped preachers and listeners from letting their imaginations run wild. After all, she\u2019s had five husbands, and now she\u2019s living with a man out of wedlock. So it\u2019s been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":22558,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2752,5677,7036,10721,13716],"class_list":["post-22440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gospel-of-john","tag-divorce","tag-jesus","tag-marriage","tag-samaritan","tag-widow"],"yoast_head":"\n
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