John 7:37-38

“ On the last and great day of the feast, Jesus stood, and, speaking with a loud voice, said: If any thirsts, let him come to me and drink;

38. he that believeth on me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. ” Almost all the interpreters at the present day acknowledge that the last day of the feast is not the seventh, which was distinguished in no respect from the others, but the eighth, which was marked by certain special ceremonies. No doubt, only seven feast days are mentioned in Deuteronomy 16:13. The same is the case in Numbers 29:12; but in this passage there is found, in John 7:35, this supplementary indication: “ And on the eighth day ye shall have a solemn assembly, and ye shall do no work; ” which agrees with Leviticus 23:36, and Nehemiah 8:18: “ So they celebrated the solemn feast seven days, and on the eighth day was a solemn assembly, as it was ordained,” as well as with Josephus (Antiq. 3.10, 4, “ Celebrating the feast during eight days ”), 2Ma 10:7 and the statements of the Rabbis. The two modes of counting are easily explained: the life in tents continued seven days, and on the eighth day the people returned to their dwellings. Probably, in this return there was seen, according to the ingenious supposition of Lange, the symbol of the entrance and establishment of the people in the land of Canaan. Philo sees in this eighth day the solemn close of all the feasts of the year. Josephus also calls it: “the sacred closing of the year” (συμπέρασμα τοῦ ἐνιαυτοῦ ἁγιώτερον). This day was sanctified by a solemn assembly and the Sabbatic rest; the whole people, abandoning their tents of leafy branches, went in a procession to the temple, and from thence every one returned to his house. The treatise Succa calls this day “the last and good day.”

The δέ indicates an advance: the narrative passes to something greater. The terms εἱστήκει (pluperfect, in the sense of the imperfect) and ἔκραξε, cried, designate a more solemn attitude and a more elevated tone of voice than ordinary. For the most part, Jesus taught sitting; this time, apparently, He stood up. He was about to apply to Himself one of the most striking Messianic symbols among all those which the national history contained. It is difficult to hold, with Reuss, that the figure of which He makes use at this solemn moment was not suggested to Him by some circumstance connected with the feast. Thus almost all the commentators think that He alludes to the libation which was made every morning during the sacred week. Led by a priest, the whole people, after the sacrifice, went down from the temple to the fountain of Siloam; the priest filled at this fountain, already celebrated by the prophets, a golden pitcher, and carried it through the streets amid joyful shouts of the multitude, and with the sound of cymbals and trumpets.

The rejoicing was so great that the Rabbis were accustomed to say that he who had not been present at this ceremony and the other similar ones which distinguished this feast, did not know what joy is. On the return to the temple, the priest went up to the altar of burnt-offering; the people cried out to him: “Lift up thy hand!” and he made the libation, turning the golden pitcher to the West, and to the East a cup filled with wine from two silver vases pierced with holes. During the libation, the people sang, always to the sound of cymbals and trumpets, the words of Isaiah 12:3: “ Ye shall draw water with joy out of the well of salvation,” words to which the Rabbinical tradition quite specially attributed a Messianic significance. It may seem probable, therefore, that Jesus alludes to this rite. No doubt, objection is made that according to Rabbi Judah, this libation was not made on the eighth day. But even if it were so, Lange judiciously observes that it was precisely the void occasioned by the omission of this ceremony on this day that must have called forth this testimony which was designed to fill it. This method of acting was much better than that of creating a sort of competition with the sacred rite, at the very moment when it was being performed as on the preceding days in the midst of tumultuous joy. Nevertheless we have a more serious reason to allege against this reference of the word of Jesus to the ritual libation.

Would it be worthy of Jesus to take for His starting-point in a testimony so important as that which He is about to give, a ceremony which is altogether human? What was this rite? An emblem contrived by the priests for recalling to mind one of the great theocratic miracles wrought in the desert, the pouring forth of the water from the rock. Now, why should not Jesus, instead of thinking of the humanly instituted emblem, have gone back even to the divine blessing itself, which this rite served to recall? The word which He utters stands in a much more direct relation to the miracle than to the ceremony. In the latter it was not the question of drinking, but only of drawing and pouring out the water, while, in the miracle in the wilderness, the people quenched their thirst from the stream of water coming forth from the rock. It is, then, not to this golden pitcher carried in the procession, but to the rock itself from which God had caused the living water to flow, that Jesus compares Himself. In chap. 2. He had presented Himself as the true temple, in chap. 3, as the true brazen serpent, in chap. 6, as the bread from heaven, the true manna; in chap. 7, He is the true rock; in chap. 8, He will be the true luminous cloud, and soon, until chap. 19 where He will finally realize the type of the Paschal lamb. Thus Jesus takes advantage of the particular circumstances of each feast, to show the Old Covenant realized in His person, so fully does He feel and know Himself as the essence of all the theocratic symbols. In view of all this we may estimate aright the opinion of those who make the fourth Gospel a writing foreign or even opposed to the Old Covenant (Reuss, Hilgenfeld, etc.)!

The solemn testimony of John 7:37-38 therefore places us again face to face with the scene in the wilderness, which had been so vividly recalled, during the course of the feast, by the joyous ceremony of the libation. The first words: “ If any man thirsts,” bring before our eyes the whole people consumed by thirst in the wilderness. To all those who resemble these thirsting Israelites, the invitation, which is about to follow, addresses itself. Thirst is the emblem of spiritual needs. Comp. Matthew 5:6: “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness.” These are the hearts which the Father has taught and drawn by means of a docile listening to Moses. The expression ἐάν τις, if it happens that any one, reminds us how sporadic these cases are; for the spiritual wants can be easily stifled. For every thirsty heart, Jesus will be what the rock from which the living water sprang forth was for the Israelites: “ Let him come unto me and drink. ” These two imperatives, thus united, signify: There is nothing else to do but to come; when once he has come, let him drink, as formerly the people did. Reuss, Weiss and Keil object to this interpretation of John 7:37, that in John 7:38 it is the believer who is represented as the refreshing stream. But John 7:38 can in no case serve to explain the idea of John 7:37.

For there is between the two, not a relation of explanatory repetition, but a relation of distinctly marked advance. The believer, after having his own thirst quenched (John 7:37), becomes himself capable of quenching the thirst of other souls (John 7:38); this is the striking proof of the fullness with which his own spiritual wants have been satisfied. Now, if the idea changes from John 7:37 to John 7:38, the figure may also change. In John 7:37, the believer drinks of the water of the Rock; in John 7:38, he becomes himself a rock for others. How magnificently is the promise of John 7:37: Let him drink, confirmed by this experience! He will be so filled, that he will himself overflow in streams of living water. One of the greatest difficulties of this passage has always been to know what expression of the Old Testament Jesus alludes to, when He says in John 7:38: as the Scripture has said; for nowhere does the Old Testament promise to believers the privilege of becoming themselves fountains of living water. Meyer, Weiss, Keil, Reuss, etc., cite passages such as Isaiah 44:3: “I will pour water upon him that is thirsty...and my Spirit upon his seed”; 55.1: “ All ye who are thirsty, come to the waters; ” 58:: “ Thou shalt be like a watered garden and as a fountain whose waters fail not. ” Comp. also Joel 3:18; Zechariah 14:8; Ezekiel 47:1 ff. etc. But, 1. In none of these passages is the idea expressed which forms the special feature of the promise of Jesus in John 7:38 that of the power communicated to the believer of quenching the thirst of other souls. 2. Nothing in these passages can serve to explain the strange expression κοιλία, his heart (literally, his belly). Hengstenberg, always preoccupied with the desire to discover the Song of songs in the New Testament, cites Song of Solomon 4:12: “ My sister, my spouse, thou art a barred garden, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed,” and John 7:15: “ Oh fountain of gardens, oh well of living waters, flowing streams from Lebanon! ” And as these citations strike against the same objection as the preceding, he tries to explain the figure of κοιλία by an allusion to Song of Solomon 7:2, where the navel of Sulamith is compared to a round goblet. What puerilities!

According to Bengel, Jesus was thinking of the golden pitcher which served for the libation during the feast; according to Gieseler, of the subterranean cavern situated in the hill of the temple, from which escaped the waters which came forth by the fountain of Siloam. But these two explanations of the term κοιλία give no account of the formula of citation which refers us to the Old Testament itself (ἡ γραφή, the Scripture). By a desperate expedient, Stier and Gess desire to connect the words: he that believeth on me, with John 7:37, and to make them the subject of the imperative πινέτω : “Let him that believeth on me drink.” One comes thus to the point of referring the pronoun αὐτοῦ, “of his heart,” no longer to the believer, but to Christ. But where has the Scripture ever spoken of the κοιλία of the Messiah? And the construction is evidently forced. The pronoun αὐτοῦ cannot refer to the object ἐμέ me, but only to the subject of the sentence: “ he that cometh. ” Chrysostom makes the Scriptural quotation bear upon the notion of believing: “He who believes on me conformably to the Scriptures. ”

But nothing in the idea of faith calls for a special appeal here to the Old Testament. Semler, Bleek, Weizsacker think they see in this passage an allusion to an unknown apocryphal writing; Ewald to a lost passage of Proverbs. These would be singular exceptions in the teaching of Jesus. The true explanation seems to me to come from the event itself, of which we believe that Jesus was thinking in John 7:37. It is said in Exodus 17:6: “Behold, I will stand before thee there upon the rock in Horeb, and thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come from within it (mimmennou) waters and the people shall drink;” and Numbers 20:11: “ And abundant waters came forth,” comp. also Deuteronomy 8:15; Psalms 114:8. It seems to me probable that these passages had been read on the occasion of the feast, and, that, being present to all minds, they furnished the occasion for this citation: as the Scripture hath said. The expression of Jesus ποταμοὶ ὕδατος, rivers of water, reproduces that in the Mosaic narrative מיִם רְִַבּים ַ (abundant waters). The expression κοιλία αὐτοῦ, his belly, is derived from the word mimmennou, from within him. This figure, borrowed from the interior cavity of the rock, from which the waters must have sprung forth, is applied first to Christ Himself, then to the man whose thirst Christ has quenched, and whom He fills with His presence and grace. The future ῥεύσουσιν, shall flow, recalls the similar form of the Old Testament: “ waters shall come forth. ” The word ὁ πιστεύων, he that believeth, is a nominative placed at the beginning as a nominative absolute, and one which finds its grammatical construction in the αὐτοῦ which follows: comp. John 6:39; John 17:2, etc. If the change of idea and of figure from John 7:37 to John 7:38 appears abrupt, it must not be forgotten that, according to John 7:40, and from the nature of things, we have only a very brief summary of the discourse of Jesus.