the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) In these few verses, Jesus overthrew several barriers: cultural and ethnic, sexist, social and religious. First, he overthrew the cultural and ethnic barrier that separated the Jews from the Samaritans. In the eighth century BC, the Assyrians had conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. These Assyrians had a policy of deporting
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