It would appear, then, that John began baptizing, in the first instance, near Jericho, and made his appeal to Jerusalem and all Judea; that next, remembering the other great section of the Jews in Galilee, he removed to Bethabara in the north; and further, because the reformed religion was not to be for the Jews alone, he entered Samaria itself and baptized at Ænon.
At the head-springs of Ænon we are only about 5 miles from Jacob’s Well. Conder and others consider the identity of Jacob’s Well beyond question, because Jewish and Samaritan tradition, Christian and Mohammedan tradition all agree about it. The identity is further supported by the proximity of Joseph’s Tomb, about 600 yards north of it, a tomb venerated by the members of every religious community in Palestine. A Christian church was built round Jacob’s Well before the year 383 A.D., and destroyed before Crusading times, only the vault or crypt remaining. The ruins covered up the well and hid it altogether some few years ago; but Captain Anderson, of the Palestine Exploration Fund, removed them and descended by a rope. The Arabs allowed the rope to twirl and slip, so that Anderson went into a swoon, from which he was awakened by the shock of striking the bottom. He measured the well and found it 7½ feet in diameter and 75 feet deep. Anciently it must have been deeper, for some of the ruins have fallen into it, and every passing traveller throws in a stone to hear it fall. The question arises, why there should be any well at this spot at all, seeing that the valley (between Ebal and Gerizim) abounds in streams of water, and there is one stream only 100 yards from the well itself? The answer given is that the man who dug the well had no right to use the streams; he was a stranger in the land, and felt the need of a supply of water upon his own property.
Jacob’s Well is one of the few spots undoubtedly rendered sacred by the feet of Christ. When the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was baptizing more disciples than John, Jesus left Judea for Galilee, “and he must needs pass through Samaria. So he cometh to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph, and Jacob’s Well was there. Jesus, therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus by the well. It was about the sixth hour. There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water,” &c. (John iv. 1-7). This woman, we suppose, came from Sychar; but an unaccountable confusion has grown up between Sychar and Shechem. If the woman had come from Shechem she would have to carry her pitcher a mile and a half to the well, passing abundant streams on the way--an apparently needless trouble. But the early Christians used to place Sychar a mile east of Shechem, and our explorers agree with Canon Williams and others in identifying it with the village of ’Askar, which stands within sight of the well, about half a mile distant, on the slope of Ebal. Yet the Crusaders confounded Sychar with Shechem, misleading everybody who came after; the error lasting to our own time, and reappearing even in carefully-written books.