“He would have given you living water”
If you knew the gift of God and who is asking you for a drink, you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water. (John 4:7–15 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A poetic spiritual metaphor.
The cultural key
'Living water' (mayim chayim) was first of all a plumbing term: flowing spring water, as opposed to still water standing in a cistern; it was also the highest grade of water in purity law, required for the most serious cleansings. Jacob's well is deep, and fed largely by percolation: cistern-grade. So the woman hears a man with no bucket offering premium running water at a famous but stagnant source, which is why she asks if he outranks Jacob. Behind the pun stands Jeremiah 2:13: 'they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns... broken cisterns that can hold no water.' The scene's frame is equally loaded: Jews and Samaritans avoided sharing vessels ('no dealings' likely means exactly that), and the woman is drawing at noon, alone; many readers see social exile in that timestamp, though it is an inference.
Recovered meaning
Jeremiah's old accusation becomes an offer: stop hauling from broken cisterns; the fountain itself is asking you for a drink. And the offer is made across the deepest social ditch available, to a Samaritan woman with a complicated history, who becomes the Gospel's first evangelist to her town.