The thirst for living water in a dry land

In ancient Greece, some time before a mob threw him off a cliff, Aesop noticed that familiarity breeds contempt. In Judea, six hundred years later, before a similarly violent death, another captivating storyteller complained that the ears of his audience had grown "dull of hearing."

It's a problem peculiar to the devout that their sacred tales risk growing stale when exposed to the air of constant reverence. We all know how hard it is to find shelf space, but what curious Christian can help feeling that the four Gospels are a little sparse when John signs off by claiming, "There are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written."

Today, denied access to those "many other things," one of the ways the Gospel stories can be multiplied is by peering into the tantalizing gaps between them. It's an act of literary imagination that takes us into the ancient texts and our own contemporary concerns.

Obery Hendricks's debut novel, "Living Water," boldly wades into the life of the unnamed woman whom Jesus met at a well in Samaria. Their brief encounter, as told only in the Gospel of John, sparkles with irony and word play. It also raises a number of fascinating questions about this spunky woman who dares to banter with a strange man, confront the prejudice between their peoples, discuss her shameful marital history, and proclaim his divinity.

In Jesus' career, this is not a particularly significant conversation - it makes a point about his messiahship that's made just as well elsewhere. But by imagining the events that led her to this encounter, Hendricks takes us into a world of startling savagery and demonstrates the healing power of Jesus' message in a wonderfully dramatic way.

The novel begins with the woman's childhood in a "small slice of the land of Samaria from which whole families spend their lives coaxing their subsistence and struggling to survive the greed and brutality of the legions of Caesar." She's an unusually happy little girl in a culture that usually crushes the happiness of little girls. As she skips home singing out greetings, the village men stop weeding their gardens, click their tongues, and warn their own children that no girl should act so gibora.

The narrator explains, "When applied to a man, this Hebrew word gibora is a good thing. Evocative of strength, bravery, and boldness, in the Scriptures it anoints men as heroes and is even used to praise the strength of God. But when applied to a female of any age, gibora is not a pleasing thing. For a woman to be called gibora means that she is 'mannish,' that she does not know her place, that she speaks up and talks back, and that she is committed to the blasphemy of daring to claim the same standing before God as men."

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