The first observation about this period in the allegory is that the Gentile branches that had been grafted into the tame olive tree were bearing good fruit (vv. 16–18). One place where this part of the allegory was fulfilled is the city of Samaria, where the Savior, at a well originally dug by Jacob, asked a Samaritan woman for a drink of water (John 4). The Samaritans were the product of the intermarriage between the Israelites who remained in the land after the Assyrian conquest of 721 B.C. They married the Babylonians and other Gentiles brought in by the Assyrians (2 Kings 17:24 quoted above). Jesus’s disciples’ were amazed that he was conversing with the Samaritan woman because it was against the traditional behavior of the Jews. Jesus taught them that the fields of the Samaritans “are white already to harvest” (John 4:35). The graft had taken hold, and the mixture of the Israelites and Gentiles was bearing fruit.