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their childhood home

John 4:5
"Then cometh He to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph."

The Samaritans were Jewish before the Assyrias conquered them. The Asyrians killed many and enslaved the rest. The Asyrians broke down the culture and traditions of the people they conquered. The Asyrians goal was to break the society and either neutralize them or assimilate them. Decades of this treatment made the northern kingdom Jews into the Samaritans. We can think of them as half-Jewish and half-Gentile. And, "fully" Jews people reviled them like TRAITORS!

Jesus will be reaching out to the Samaritans in this week's reading. The place He has come to has a long history that Jews and Samaritans share. This land was acquired by Jacob after being reunited with his estranged brother Esau. Jacob was renamed "Israel" by God, becoming the patriarch of the Jewish people and, by extension, the people who became the Samaritans. This land is their shared homeland. The childhood home of the twelve tribes of Israel. And this piece was given to Joseph, whose life was a foreshadowing of the Salvation and forgiveness that Jesus Christ brings!
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