He Started by Asking
"Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”"
— John 4:6-10
The quarrel behind this scene was old, and it was mostly about religion. The northern people worshipped on the mountain above that town; the southern people insisted on Jerusalem. She raises that dispute herself a few lines later. The northern side also accepted only the five books of Moses as scripture and rejected the rest. More than a century before this, southern forces had destroyed their temple on that mountain. So the traveller resting there belonged to the side that had pulled it down. She points out a moment later that the shaft is deep and he carries nothing to lower into it. The phrase he uses, "living water", was ordinary speech for running water from a spring. It was the opposite of what stood still in a household cistern. When his companions came back, what surprised them was that he was talking with a woman at all. His first words to her were a request, not a verdict on her life.