“What’s in a name?”

“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare, the great English playwright and poet once asked. He continued, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Jabez is an unknown man, whose entire life is summed up in just two Old Testament verses. Jabez is buried in a long list of genealogies – “so and so was the father of so and so, and so and so was the father of so and so” and the list goes on for nine chapters in the first book of Chronicles. We get so bored by the time we reach Jabez that we almost skip over him.