Jacob's Well

Jacob's Well is the traditional well on the eastern side of Nablus, southeast of Tell Balata, the mound that holds the ruins of ancient Shechem. It lies at the foot of Mount Gerizim, where the pass between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal opens to the east, at the junction where the main road from Jerusalem forks. It is called Bir Ya'qub, "the well of Jacob". Its name comes from John 4, the only passage in the Bible that names it (John 4:5-6, 12).

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The well in the Bible

John 4:5-6 places "Jacob's well" at a town of Samaria called Sychar, "near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph". In John 4:12 the woman at the well speaks of "our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock". Writing in 1915, W. Ewing explains that phrear, "tank" or "reservoir", is "the word actually used" in John 4:11-12, and that pege, "spring", the other word John uses for it, does not strictly fit it.

Genesis records that Jacob, coming from Paddan Aram, camped just outside Shechem, bought the plot where he pitched his tent from the sons of Hamor, Shechem's father, for a hundred pieces of silver, and set up an altar there that he called El-Elohe-Israel (Genesis 33:18-20). The bones of Joseph, brought up from Egypt, were later buried at Shechem in that plot, which became an inheritance for Joseph's descendants (Joshua 24:32). Neither passage mentions a well, and the Old Testament records no well there (Genesis 33:18-20; Joshua 24:32).

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The traditional site

Accounts from 1915 and 1975 give the well's depth as about 75 feet (23 m), with the shaft probably partly filled with debris over the years. By the 4th century AD a church stood over it: Jerome, in a letter recalling Paula's visit there, records that she "entered the church built upon the side of Mount Gerizim around Jacob's well". Pilgrims' accounts record that churches were built over the well at different times. The last of the medieval churches, built in the Crusader period, was probably demolished after the Crusaders' defeat in 1187. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem acquired the site in 1860. Today the well lies in a crypt beneath the present Greek Orthodox church.

Few traditional sites are so little doubted, and Ewing found "no good reason to doubt" the tradition. The traditional site of Joseph's tomb is also near Tell Balata.