The major part of this chapter (verses 1-42) recalls Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in Sychar.

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter are: The Pharisees learn that Jesus is baptizing more people than John the Baptist.

[4] Jesus ('the Lord' in the Textus Receptus and the Westcott-Hort translation) learns this, leaves Judea, and sets off to return to Galilee.

"[6] Verse 4 records that in order to reach Galilee "it was necessary ... to go through Samaria",[7] although an alternative route through Peraea on the eastern side of the Jordan could have been taken.

[9] H. W. Watkins, in the 19th-century Anglican bishop Charles Ellicott's commentaries, notes that the Pharisees "took the longer road through Peraea, to avoid contact with the country and people of Samaria".

The editors of the Jerusalem Bible link her five husbands with the five groups of settlers who were brought into Samaria by Shalmaneser V, the king of Assyria who occupied Samaria according to the narrative in 2 Kings 17: they came from Babylon, Cuthah, Ava, Hamath, and Sepharvaim and replaced the people of the northern Kingdom of Israel who were taken into exile.

But "to this Samaritan woman - speaking, I suppose, the conceptions of her race - the Messiah was One who was to "tell us all things" about the worship of God.

Lutheran theologian Hermann Olshausen described this incident as "further remarkable, as a rare instance of the Lord's ministry producing an awakening on a large scale".

After the two days, when Jesus stays in Sychar "in compliance with [the Samaritans'] invitation",[18] he then travels back to Galilee, resuming the journey commenced in verse 3.

[20] In Galilee, Jesus returns to Cana,[21] where a certain nobleman or royal official (Greek: τις βασιλικὸς, tis basilikos) from Capernaum, 38 kilometres (24 mi) away,[22] asks him to heal his sick son.

Alfred Plummer, in the Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges, rejects the term "nobleman" as "inaccurate - the word has nothing to do with birth".

[23] Jesus seems annoyed because people only seem to believe in him if he performs miracles (Greek: σημεῖα καὶ τέρατα, sēmeia kai terata, "signs and wonders").