What Is the Real Meaning of the Prayer of Jabez?

Had Bruce Wilkinson not published The Prayer of Jabez in 2000, most of us probably would not have heard of it. Oh sure, we would have read the prayer when our Bible reading plan marched us through 1 Chronicles 4:9–10. Yet I wonder if we would have thought much about it. Historically, Christians have not paid much attention to this prayer. Commentaries from the early and medieval church give it little more than a glance. And yet it has entered into our religious lexicon, and the credit for this goes almost entirely to Wilkinson’s work. But in so entering, it has made us think more carefully about how strange the story of Jabez is. As Scott Hahn points out, “Jabez appears as if out of nowhere in the Chronicler’s genealogy—in the middle of a list of Judahites but without any reference to his father.”1 In other words, Jabez has a mysterious air to him, much like Melchizedek in Genesis 14. But we should not let this mystery, nor its neglect by centuries of commentators, prevent us from patient study of the prayer of Jabez. This passage is truly spiritually rewarding. In this article, I want to demystify the prayer of Jabez by uncovering its original context and commending its edifying u...