There are a few stories in the Hebrew Bible that feature a well or watering hole. If you think about it, they are also very similar stories.
Rebeccah and Abraham’s servant
Moses and the daughters of the priest of Midian
When these people met at the local well, the end of the narrative was a marriage. It seems like this was a common practice in that time and place. There is significance to all of this; after all, a well symbolizes life.
An Underrated Favorite
These three stories that end in marriage are all lovely stories, but there is another Meet Me at the Well story that is my absolute favorite. This one changed my perspective of God, myself, and everybody else. I want to share why this particular story is so exciting to me.
My favorite story is featured in Genesis 16 and stars a very improbable character named Hagar. I say improbable because this is someone who doesn’t have faith in the God of the Bible. She is also a woman. She is a foreign woman and she is a runaway servant woman.
I think those definitions make her a very improbable character for what is about to happen. Remember, she is also “just a woman”.
Facing Reality
There is so much in this chapter that I can’t get into in just one article so I plan to do more on this topic. That’s the reality of the depths of God’s story. But there is room in this article to face a little bit of the reality this story holds within it.
The little bit of reality that I want to bring out in this article is that this encounter at the well is a meeting between a lowly woman and the God of the universe. Let that sink in a little bit. Genesis 16 records the “first occurrence of the Jehovah angel (probably none other than the Lord Jesus Himself…)”¹
If this little bit of Bible knowledge isn’t enough to get you excited, I don’t know what will. Think about it, God came to this woman with all these negative terms to define her and spoke to her directly. He didn’t wait for Abram to show up, he went to her for this conversation. And, she was the first recorded person to experience this.
A Change of Perspective
I’ve struggled for many years (and I know other women who still struggle) with being a Christian woman. Even if it is unintentional, some Bible teaching can make me feel that we women are second-class Christians. Most Bible teachers are men and most Bible stories are about men.
I think this story proves that women are not unimportant or second-class. I think this story shows that God loves everyone and wants to work in everyone’s life. There are no people who are less-than. This fact alone should change how we perceive everybody we meet.
Yes, I realize this is not the only point of this story and there is so much more that can be gleaned from it, but this one point has changed my life because it changed my perspective of myself. It revealed to me the truth of who God is and how he views me even though I’m “just a woman”.
¹Phillips, John Exploring Genesis. Kregel Publications, 1980, pp.140.
