Is the prayer of Jabez humorous? The problem with defining humour is that we all see it differently. What is funny to one person may not even remotely be humorous to another. All humour, including the humour of the Hebrew Bible, is subjective. Whether or not someone finds something amusing depends on a huge range of factors, including their primary language(s), cultural background, and life experiences. I had a Danish friend who would tell me that the Danes had the best humour in the world. One day he tried to convince me by telling a Danish joke, but when he got to the punch-line he switched to Danish and then struggled with how to translate that into English. Tom was laughing uproariously, while I was none the wiser. It is difficult – impossible at times – to translate humour from one language into another, and if we’re reading the Bible in English we’ll likely miss some of the Hebrew humour.
But then, we don’t need to be laughing uproariously for something to be humorous. There are many different kinds of humour and to varying degrees. An image that brings a wry smile to our face can be considered as humorous, although it’s in a different class to a stand-up comedy act that leaves us rolling in the aisles. Humour doesn’t need a punchline to make us smile, nor does it need to be satirical, or particularly clever. Some humour works well in one context, but falls flat in another.
Good satire or parody, in particular, can be hard to detect. The better it is, the more likely it is that someone will take it seriously and miss the joke entirely. I’ve told the story before about having a conversation many years ago with a good friend about the clichés that were used in church prayers far too often. Together, we came up with an impressive list of all the prayer-clichés we could think of. A few days later my friend’s church had a social function in the church hall and my friend was called on to say grace before dinner. Being young, brash, and a bit cheeky, my friend decided to have some fun while having a pointed poke at what had become a traditional, yet irrelevant style of prayer. He made use of every one of those clichés in a rather lengthy parody of grace before dinner. Later that evening an elderly lady came to him and said “I’ve been a member of this church for forty years, and that was the loveliest prayer I’ve ever heard!” That’s a sign of truly clever parody – people will be divided as to whether it is serious (and in this case pious), or is making a joke at the expense of those who take it seriously.
I suggested in The prayer of Jabez (1) that there are some possible signs of humour in this very short story: the ambiguity about whether he was “more honourable” or “heavier” than his brothers; his mother’s pun on his name which doesn’t work unless we re-arrange the letters and call him “Jazeb” instead of “Jabez”; and then his prayer which asked for more ariable land, possibly to satisfy an insatiable appetite (related to the “fat baby” trope). You may find this mildly amusing rather than uproariously funny, or perhaps you don’t find fat-baby jokes funny at all, but humour is, after all, in the eye of the beholder.
If the Jabez story was meant to be humorous in one way or another, the really odd thing would be that it’s found in one of the least amusing books in the Hebrew Bible: Chronicles! If it were in a book known for satire or irony, such as Genesis or Samuel, it wouldn’t be as surprising. But why here, of all places, and why in the middle of the driest and least funny part of the book, a long list of names and genealogies?
I’ve noted previously that this story seems to be out of place. It looks like it was a story which originally existed independently but was dropped into the genealogical records by some scribe who saw a connection to the scribal town of Jabez which was mentioned earlier, or to Othniel who is mentioned soon after, or both. The humour may have been more obvious in its original context, but becomes less effective as an independent story. It certainly doesn’t work well in the middle of a boring genealogy. Much like the elderly lady in my friend’s church, who thought his cheeky prayer was lovely, this scribe may have simply missed the humour and thought it was a good story about a pious ancestor which needed preserving. Perhaps none of his fellow-scribes dared to tell him it was a joke, especially after he had carefully written it on an expensive parchment scroll.
Christopher Heard has noted that land acquisition (or loss) figures prominently as a recurring theme in Chronicles and the Jabez story seems to fit into this thematic pattern.1 This is likely why the scribe thought to include it (as a serious anecdote), but struggled to find the right place for it – since Jabez isn’t named anywhere in the genealogies.
The Jabez story doesn’t strike me as a piece of satire. Even if it was in Samuel-Kings – where satire is more easily recognisable – it still wouldn’t appear to be targeting anyone, or anything (and for something to be satire it must have a target). Chronicles doesn’t appear (to me) to use satire at all, so if this story is humorous then it’s a different kind of humour to what we might expect to see elsewhere. I think it’s just a funny fat-baby joke that wasn’t particularly clever (the name-pun doesn’t even work unless the letters are re-arranged, which could be another sign that the scribe who inserted the story here wasn’t very proficient).
That, to me, is the funniest thing about this story: it doesn’t really belong here, but a scribe who was trying to be seriously clever (though not very clever after all) thought it would work and inadvertently included a funny store that didn’t actually work well out of its original context. The story itself isn’t all that funny, but it’s funny that a very serious scribe didn’t realise that it was meant to be humorous – and so the joke was on him. And the fact that the Bible was written by people who were very human is, in a strange way, somewhat reassurring.
1. Heard, R. Christopher. “Echoes of Genesis in 1 Chronicles 4:9–10: An Intertextual and Contextual Reading of Jabez’s Prayer.” Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 4, no. 2 (2002): 1-28.
מִקְרָא Mikra: Biblical studies 
Hi Stephen,
I think you are probably right about the scribe being unaware that there was something humorous with this pun. It still doesn’t explain why this snippet was included in the first place as it really doesn’t fit in even if it wasn’t intended to be funny.
In a wider scope I don’t really know if Chronicles were only written to whitewash the more scandalous parts from Kings or it is just averse to anything remotely humorous as an additional agenda. I remember there were some Greek philosophers who declared all funny myths about the gods behaving like mortals blasphemy, but kings are no gods so there the analogy fails. I took some time searching for humorous snippets in Chronicles and I can think of only one and that was almost verbatim taken over from the book of Samuel:
In 1 Chronicles 19 we read the following funny intrigue where beards were shaven off to bare the cheeks and buttocks bared by partly cutting the mantles off to create a comic spectacle:
1Some time later, Nahash king of the Ammonites died and was succeeded by his son. 2And David said, “I will show kindness to Hanun son of Nahash, because his father showed kindness to me.”
So David sent messengers to console Hanun concerning his father. But when David’s servants arrived in the land of the Ammonites to console him, 3the princes of the Ammonites said to Hanun, “Just because David has sent you comforters, do you really believe he is showing respect for your father? Have not his servants come to you to explore the land, spy it out, and overthrow it?”
4So Hanun took David’s servants, shaved their beards, cut off their garments at the hips, and sent them away.
5When someone came and told David about his men, he sent messengers to meet them, since the men had been thoroughly humiliated. The king told them, “Stay in Jericho until your beards have grown back, and then return.”
Now how come this highly comical story ends up in the highly uncomical Chronicles?
I can see one logical explanation. The author took it over from Samuel, but not laughingly but fuming about the insult. He was aware of the insult but not of the comedy, that is the one-sided reaction of the receiver of humorous insult. Sometimes it is enough to change position from the point of view of parties in a conflict to change opinion from harmless fun to unforgivable insult and we know the position of the chronicler all-right so I consider this question solved.
Clasina, I’m always on the lookout for possible homour in the Bible, but I’m not convinced that this story in 1 Chronicles 19 (which was taken over from 2 Samuel 10) is “highly comical.” The Ammonite king Hanun was intending to shame and humiliate David’s emissaries, but I don’t think this meets the criteria for humour, at least not from the Judahite perspective. The writers of Chronicles would have seen it as insult against David and they may have wanted to highlight David’s initial restraint as a positive attribute. What I personally find most interesting here is the way Chronicles has ignored 2 Samuel 11 which follows immediately after this story and forms part of the same literary unit. The story of David and Bathsheba does not show David in a positive light, and therefore did not suit the purposes of the writers of Chronicles, and they therefore ignored it.
Well Stephen,
The humour of a combo of bare cheeks and buttocks is self-explanatory enough for my senses. The rest of the intrigue with this insult being the pretext for a bloody war and punitive campaign makes it even funnier, I suspect an analogy in the description of all battle-movements, with wordplay of fighting on front and rear especially conspicuous when the rear squadrons of the fleeing Arameans and the head of the troops, Shobak were cut down. I even suspect the name of that commander is a pun on the beard.
Now you were more interested in why the missing story of David and Bathsheba in Chronicles, but why bother if it is in Samuel in all it’s glory? So Chronicles is an inferior, censored and derivative version of Samuel and Kings, why not leave it at that? I don’t think I will read it ever again.
More generically I am most interested in the particular macabre character of biblical humour. I noticed most humour in there in itself or it’s consequences is almost always quite gruesome, bloody or scandalous, and often matter of factly cynical. Just harmless fun is rather scarce. Come to think of it the story of David and Bathsheba is almost a poster-child for the genre. The ironic intrigue is intricate and humorous, scandalous and gruesome at the same time.
Why that is so, anybodies guess I guess, but you are welcome to try and devise a theory on that for your blog.