Shechem or Shchem (שְׁכֶם / שְׁכָם "Shoulder", Standard HebrewŠəḫem / Šəḫam, Tiberian HebrewŠəḵem / Šəḵām) was the first capital of the Kingdom of Israel. It is also the location of Jacob's Well, where Gospel of John 4:5-6 sets Jesus' meeting with the woman of Samaria, lay in a narrow shoulder of land in the narrow valley between Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, approximately 65 km north of Jerusalem. The Ancient Roman and Arab city of Nablus lies 2 km to the west of the site. Josephus, writing in about AD 90 (Jewish Antiquities book 4, 8.44), placed the city between Mt Gerizim and Mt Ebal, and other ancient writers knew that it was on the outskirts of "Neapolis"/Nablus, but its archaeological site was only stumbled upon in 1903 by a German party of archaeologists led by Dr Hermann Thiersch, at a site known as Tell Balatah, beside the traditional site associated with the tomb of Joseph (Joshua 24:32).
Shechem had been a Canaanite settlement, mentioned on an Egyptianstele of a noble at the court of Senusret III (c. 1880 - 1840 BC). Shechem first appears in the Tanakh in Genesis 12:6-8, which records how Abraham reached the "great tree of Moreh" at Shechem and offered sacrifice nearby. Later Joseph's bones were brought out of Egypt and reburied at Shechem.
In Acts vii. 16 the place is called "Sychem", and in the Gospel of John v. 5 it is called "Sychar".
The well, from which Jesus once asked a Samaritan woman for a drink, is fed by underground springs, and its water is fresh and cool.
The Genesis saga does say that Jacob purchased land at the village of Shechem, modern Nablus, very near this Samarian site of Sychar, now known as Askar (Gen. 23:18-20; see Joshua 24:32; John 4:5).
The road south from Sychar became the Ridge Road, the "Patriarch’s Highway," that led to Hebron and Beersheba.
The possibility of identifying Sychar with ancient Shechem has also been eliminated by the positive identification of Tell Balatah as the site of Shechem that was destroyed, probably by Hyrcanus, in 107 B.C. No Roman remains have been found there, an indication that it was not occupied when Jesus and His disciples visited Samaria.
The village of Sychar, nestled against the southeastern slope of Mount Ebal, overlooked the stage of an historic drama (John 4:3-42).
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