Once again the person with whom Jesus is speaking misunderstands (compare 3.4) and thus gives Jesus an opportunity to explain further what he means.

Here also the verse begins with a Semitic formula for introducing discourse which is redundant in English: “Jesus answered and said to her” (Good News Translation Jesus answered).

What God gives is a noun phrase in Greek (literally “the gift of God”). It is rendered as a verb phrase in some translations (Phillips “what God can give”; New English Bible “what God gives”; Jerusalem Bible “what God is offering”). Some commentators understand “God’s gift” to be Jesus, and it is possible that New American Bible takes it in this way (“If only you recognized God’s gift, and who it is that is asking you for a drink”). However, in the context the gift of God seems to be other than Jesus himself, perhaps God’s Spirit or the life-giving water to which Jesus refers. Of course in the theology of the Gospel of John, there is no final distinction to be made.

The verb knew must be rendered in some languages as essentially equivalent to “recognized” or “were aware of” and the clause “what God gives” must be slightly modified to suggest “what God offers to give,” for the meaning is not what God was in the process of giving to the woman but rather what he would like to give her. However, it is possible to interpret what God gives as a general reference to God providing spiritual gifts to people who respond to him. This clause can therefore be translated “what God gives to people.”

Since Jesus refers to himself in who it is that is asking you for a drink, it may be necessary in some languages to use a first person rather than a third person singular, that is, “who I am who am asking you for water to drink.”

For readers of English and most other languages, such a phrase as “living water” has zero meaning. The meaning is, of course, “water that gives life” and so the 4th edition of Good News Translation translates life-giving water. This concept of life-giving water appears in several places in John’s Gospel (3.5; 4.10-15; 7.38; 19.34). A literal translation of “living water” can be misleading in some languages. It may be taken to mean water that is alive with tadpoles, minnows, and other forms of life. Or it may suggest in some languages a kind of magic water. It is better, therefore, to translate “living water” as “water which causes life” or “water which causes people to live.”

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on the Gospel of John. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1980. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .