Jabez

In the days of the Judges, the people of Israel forgot their God and did evil in the eyes of the Lord. Israel had no king; every man did as he saw fit. And so the Lord gave Eglon, king of Moab, power over Israel for eighteen years. Again the Israelites cried out to the Lord, and he gave them a deliverer Ehud, a left-handed man, the son of Gera the Benjamite. Now Jabez was more honorable than his brothers... ...and his mother called his name Jabez, saying, "Because I bore him in pain." And Jabez called on the God of Israel, saying, "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!" So God granted him what he requested. C H A P T E R O N E T H E N A M E T he first thing I remember was my mother's crying. Some-times I think she fed me on her tears instead of her breast milk. Even then, long before she told me the story of my beginning, I think I tried to guess it in her eyes. A child sees many things that he cannot name. And then, when I was old enough, I heard it in the taunts of the other boys in the village. "Hey, Pain-boy, it hurts me just to look at you." I was small for my age and an easy target for bullies. They tripped me and hit me and rolled me in the dirt. They told me they were making me match my name. They said it with a dirty laugh and an upturned lip. My brothers, especially, used my name that way. Like a switch on my backside or a lump of dung tossed at my feet. I liked it when the Amalekites came through. They squatted on their mats in the square by the well with their camels tethered behind them. On the ground they spread their trinkets, their packets of spices, their god-totems and the shiny cloth woven with strange designs. I loved wandering among them, listening to the unfamiliar lilt of their words. When I said my name to the Ama-lekites, it was just a name. On their foreign tongues, "Jabez" meant menothing more. Jabez was the boy who talked to them, who wanted to know the names for things in their own language. He was not the boy with no father, the one who fit nowhere. I was always sad when the Amalekites left. I longed to follow them, my longing as dry and hovering as the dust kicked up by their camels. I wanted to be away from the taunts, the mocking looks. Away from the despite of my brothers. And away from my mother's silent, dark weeping. How does a boy know when he is the cause of pain? How can he give words to himself that he doesn't have? How can he understand why his presence is a wrongness, a hurt? I don't know. But so often when I heard my name in the mouth of someone who knew me, the wrongness slapped at me. My name was better to me when it came from the lips of strangers. There was an old woman, Gedilah, who lived in our village. She wandered about Beth-Zur, talking as if someone was with her, but most always there was no one there. She would sit down beside my mother when she was grinding grain. She would talk to her. No one else in Beth-Zur would sit down and talk to my mother. Sometimes I would see Gedilah on her way to the well, walking past our plot of scraggly olive trees. Sometimes, when I was pulling weeds from our chickpea patch beside the road, she would stop and settle her old, dry haunch atop the stone wall with a grunt. The bent woman would start talking to me. I don't know why. Gedilah would talk like someone continuing a conversation she had started some other time. She had a few teeth left in the back of her mouth, butLemmons, Thom is the author of 'Jabez' with ISBN 9781578565634 and ISBN 1578565634.