Sychar

Sychar was a town of Samaria that the Bible names only once, in John 4:5, which places it "near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph." The next verse adds that "Jacob's well was there" (John 4:6). Where it stood is not settled.

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Jacob's plot of ground

Genesis records that Jacob camped just outside the city of Shechem, bought the plot of ground where he had pitched his tent from the sons of Hamor 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, which the Israelites had brought up out of Egypt, were later buried at Shechem in that plot, and it became an inheritance for Joseph's descendants (Joshua 24:32).

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Where was Sychar?

Many scholars identify Sychar with the village of Askar, at the foot of Mount Ebal about half a mile (0.8 km) north of Jacob's Well. Another view takes Sychar to be Shechem itself. Jerome, who translated Eusebius's Onomasticon, kept Sychar apart from Shechem there, but in other writings he held that the spelling Sychar was a scribal error for Sychem. The Old Syriac version of the Gospels reads "Shechem" at John 4:5.

Against that view, the American excavations that G. Ernest Wright directed at Shechem dated the end of Shechem as a city to 107 BC. On that dating, the city's end came when the Jewish leader John Hyrcanus destroyed it. David G. Hansen, writing in Bible and Spade in 2005, dates the building of the new city of Flavia Neapolis to AD 72, about 1 mile (1.6 km) west of Tell Balata.

Writing on Sychar in 1915, W. Ewing objected that Askar has a plentiful spring of its own, so that its villagers had no need to carry water from Jacob's Well. He drew on a 1907 report by R. A. S. Macalister, who examined the mound of Tell Balata and, as Ewing reports, found occupation there "from the days of the Hebrew monarchy down to the time of Christ." The mound lies nearer Jacob's Well than Askar does, about 1/4 mile (0.4 km) from it. Finding the mound without a spring and otherwise suitable, Ewing suggested that "perhaps here we may locate the Sychar of the Gospel," and that the name may have moved to Askar when the village there decayed.

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Early writers

Eusebius of Caesarea's Onomasticon, translated by C. Umhau Wolf, places Sychar east of Neapolis, near Jacob's field. The Bordeaux Pilgrim, an anonymous traveler whose journey is dated by the consuls named in the text to AD 333, put "a place by the name of Sychar" a mile from Shechem.