"And Jabez was more honourable than his brethren."--1 CHRON. iv, 9.
This is a curious fragment of biography, half-hidden in a dreary mass
of wholly uninteresting names. We cannot conjecture how it got there.
It seems to have no connection either with what comes before or what
follows. It is like a sweet little poem in the midst of a dry,
genealogical chart; or like a real, living face with the flush of warm
colour in it, speaking amid endless rows of mummies or waxwork effigies.
It is indeed the short, incomplete story of a life with neither
beginning nor end. We are not told who his father was, or who his
mother was, or what tribe or family he belonged to. Not a word about
origin, descent, pedigree. And there seems to be a purpose in this.
For the sacred writer at this point is doing nothing else but tracing
pedigrees. These four chapters are to us the most useless in the
Bible: names, nothing but long-forgotten names. Names of everybody's
father, grandfather, great-grandfather, back to a remote antiquity. I
question whether there are many Bible readers who have ever laboured
through the list. Yet these family trees, as we may call them, were
very precious to the Jews. They thought as much of long descent as my
lord Noodle does now. It swelled them immeasurably in self-importance
if they could trace their lineage back in unbroken line to one of the
twelve patriarchs, or to one of those who came out of Egypt. And the
historian ministers to this prejudice or vanity by diligently recording
the whole dry catalogue, and then, as if weary of the business, or,
perhaps, with just a touch of scorn, he introduces this one name as
something worth talking about.
Here was a god-made nobleman, whose heraldry need not be written on
earth, because it is more surely written in heaven. All the rest were
their fathers' sons, and that was about all. This man did not need a
pedigree: he won a name and reputation for himself without the help of
a distinguished ancestry. By prayerfulness, and energy, and courage,
he fought his way from obscurity to honour. And when that happens,
when a man has fought the fight with adverse circumstances and overcome
them, when he has made his mark in the world by sheer force of work and
character, no one cares to grope through musty fusty parchments in
search of his progenitors. What does it matter! God has given him a
certificate of noble birth; that was surely what the historian meant:
"_Jabez was more honourable than his brethren_."
Now there are two or three touches in this little story worth noticing.
God sends us some of our best joys in the guise of sorrows.