Book Review: The Prayer of Jabez

Title: The Prayer of Jabez

Author: Bruce Wilkinson

Date: 2000

Publisher: Multnomah

ISBN: 1-57673-733-0

Length: 92 pages

Quote: “Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!”

Jabez is one of the more obscure characters in the Bible. His name comes in the middle of a genealogy.

Why are those genealogies even in the Bible, anyway? I’ve known people who believed every word in the Bible ought to be significant, who tried to make moral lessons out of all those long-gone ancestors’ bare names. Jabez was a descendant of Judah, meaning “praise,” through his son Perez or Pharez, meaning “separation.” Praise is followed immediately by separation? No, the names in the genealogies don’t make sense when translated as words, or converted to numbers, or otherwise remixed. Like our names, some were given to babies by parents who wanted to commemorate an ancestor or who just liked the sound of a name, and some were chosen as having some personal significance for individuals.

The genealogies are there because they were part of the sacred law of ancient Israel. Ancient Israelites saw themselves as a family made up of tribes, each tracing descent to one of Jacob’s sons. Each tribe had its own section of land. If you could trace your descent to one of the ancestors who had gone in to drive out the enemy tribes, you had a home. Houses and land could be leased temporarily, but every fifty years the titles reverted to the descendants of the ancestor who had claimed his deed directly from Moses. The system wasn’t perfect—among other things, because descent was traced through the male line, women had to forfeit their inheritance unless they married their cousins—but despite crop failures, plagues, and famines when even the wealthy had little to eat, ancient Israel did not have a problem of homelessness.

We see here that a Bible-based society must uphold the rights of private property and individual inheritance. The ancient Israelites believed that their ancient division of territory among families was guided directly by God. Land was permanently entailed and could be leased out for up to fifty years at a time, but not permanently sold, outside the family. Family genealogies are recorded along with the law and official history of the nation because the primary function of what ancient Israel had in the way of government was to block any encroachments on private property.

In the modern United States, failure to have established such a system is generally blamed on Thomas Jefferson, who thought a less stable society would keep our democratic republic from deteriorating back into a feudal aristocracy. The result? Cash displaced land; people still complain that the playing field isn't level; meanwhile we’ve become a society of nomads where capitalism, however unethical, most often trumps any “higher” values. Call me a latter-day Southern Agrarian if you will. I think we’d have done better to stick with the system where land ownership remained permanently in families, rather than a system where greedy people buy land in order to squander its resources. Jefferson was brilliant; Moses was divinely enlightened.

Anyway there’s this long list of ancient Israelites who are remembered only as names. Their names may have been chosen for their meaning, but the official records don’t show what that meaning was. After Judah, “praise,” and Perez, “separation,” and Carmi, “my vineyard,” and Hur, “strong,” and Ishma, “he listens,” and several more, we come to Jabez, “pain,” a name that seemed to need explanation. Poor Jabez grew up answering to “pain” as a name, until one day he uttered the prayer above, and his descendants believed he was blessed just as he’d asked.

We’re not told that anyone was kind enough to change his name to something like Noam, “pleasantness,” or Shalom, “peace,” or even Lo-Jabez, “no pain,” but at least they agreed that old Pain Boy became a pain in name only.

Criticism of this book, a super-seller in its day, has generally focussed on Wilkinson’s affirmation of the “selfish” petitionary prayer “Enlarge my territory.” From a biblical point of view, the problem with encouraging people to repeat this kind of prayer is that we can’t say that God has promised to answer it (at least not in the way anyone wants). No Bible writer ever suggests that there’s anything wrong with petitionary prayer. They merely record that sometimes people get what they pray for, and sometimes they don’t. Jabez’s territory was enlarged. Others’ might not have been, even if they’d uttered the same words in the same tone that had worked so well for Jabez, because prayer is not magic. Wilkinson’s explanation of this, in a second volume of the series that started with The Prayer of Jabez, is that it may serve God’s purposes to prune things away from believers. Mine would be even simpler: most of the time it serves God’s purposes not to alter the natural consequences of people’s actions—our own, and also those of others.

Humanist psychologists have a hard time accepting the effects other people’s choices have on all of us. They want to retreat into a solipsistic obsession with emotional feelings, denying that anyone else can alter the outcome of our own choices because admitting that other people can harm us would mean admitting an objective standard of right and wrong. While the Bible is neutral about the benefits of praying that God will enlarge our territory, it is solidly opposed to the Humanist effort to pretend that people can’t harm others, or at least that if a Humanist starves his children and infects his wife with venereal disease it doesn’t matter very much because what matters is how they choose to feel about it. It behooves us to meditate at length on the benefits of seeking Divine Guidance “so that we may not cause pain.”

It’s possible that if you pray the Prayer of Jabez daily, God will not be able to enlarge your territory without overriding the natural consequences of other people’s decisions that cause you pain. For instance, even though you do honest work to help God’s Providence along, your community may have been poisoned by the “taker” mentality the Welfare State has fostered, such that, instead of paying for your honest work, your worse than worthless neighbors sneer at you and urge you to become a welfare cheat like themselves. We the people of these United States badly need a regulation to the effect that anyone convicted of welfare pushing should be permanently denied any further public funding of any kind, for any purpose, including even shelter in the prison system, so that if welfare pushers become unable to work they’re left to shelter under bridges. God is not to blame for this, nor is Jabez, and nor are you. For your own well-being you must accept no share of the blame that needs to fall on the welfare pushers.

If your sense of responsibility is healthy, if you understand “Enlarge my territory” to mean not merely “Increase my wealth” but also “Increase my obligations to raise others out of poverty,” The Prayer of Jabez will do you no harm. If, like Jabez, your understanding of prosperity is not increasing wealth at others’ expense but increasing wealth in order to build the common wealth of your community, then you have every right to pray “Enlarge my territory—give me the opportunity to provide homes and jobs for all of my people.” Whether or not it serves God’s purpose to answer such a prayer affirmatively, praying it does not damage your personality or your spirituality in the way that a prayer like “God, please make me richer than my brother” would do.