The Prophet Like Moses (Deut. 18:15–18) and the Woman at the Well (John 4:7–30) in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls

The encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman of Sychar recorded in John 4:7–30 foregrounds the concept of the Messiah as an eschatological Mosaic prophet (Deut. 18:15–18). Little attention, however, has been directed to the significance of the water imagery in the Gospel’s narrative unit to Jesus’ claim to be the Mosaic Messiah. Through a comparative study with the Dead Sea Scrolls, this paper claims that the Gospel’s dual witness to Jesus as the provider of the eternal well of living water and as the ‘prophet like Moses’ (Deut. 18:15–18) is not incidental but essential to reinforcing the coherence of the narrative section in John 4:7–30. This observation is supported by intriguing parallels observed in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which preserve evidence for the intertextual association between the prophet like Moses of Deut. 18:15–18 and the eschatological figure traceable in Joel 2:23 (cf. Hos. 10:12), in which water imagery comes to the fore. This understanding, in turn, illuminates subtle ambiguities in the interchange between Jesus and the Samaritan woman (John 4:7–30), including her apparently unanswered request for living water (v. 15) and her recognition of Jesus as ‘a prophet’ (v. 19).